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Also since you clearly have Mega Int because if you don't why are you doing superscience, and you probably built to improve your Quantum at start (since you have high Int anyway and it's part of the Quantum Triad) all these high DCs aren't actually hard to hit since you're getting a high int mod, lots of SP, and +2xQuantum to everything anyway. E: You must be a Nova, they say you need the Superhuman Template to do Superscience. It's a pre-req for the Feats.
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Aug 14, 2019 17:08
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Aug 14, 2019 17:12
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One of my favourite things in Progenitor is that all the restrictions on making super-gadgets from Godlike have been torn away. You want to give the world free energy in 1975? Go ahead!
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Aug 14, 2019 17:14
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Eufiber is also hilarious because it's basically Super Spandex, for a setting that grumpily insists no-one would wear spandex, then has lots of art of people in spandex.
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Aug 14, 2019 17:20
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Aberrant grumpily protests against a lot of conventions it indulges in; it's strange.
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Aug 14, 2019 17:29
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It wants you to be aware it's enjoying the 4 color superhero power fantasy ironically, and that it is indeed still too cool and grown up and mature for it.
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Aug 14, 2019 17:32
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I mean, doubly hilarious because "well-trained genetic supersoldiers" are probably better than most novas who aren't System Masteryed up and if you could make them without a Nova being involved at all that'd have been incredibly hilarious and I'm sad it's not possible now
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Aug 14, 2019 17:37
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Ah, I finally found the credits! They're in the back. How odd. They're normally at the front of the book or on the cover. It does not look like anyone on the design team for the d20 version worked on the main game, which might help explain the discrepancy in tone and power. The other bit is it's obviously a kind of shovelware d20 conversion afterthought product, so I doubt there was that much thought put into 'how to match the tone of the original'. E: I'm wrong, one of the original authors did work on this book. So back to the theory that this is just a throwaway shovelware OGL thing.
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Aug 14, 2019 17:39
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Young Freud posted:Furies are like the best thing about EP because they turn that whole "WH40K Space Marines are ALWAYS male" on its head, because the biomorphs are RAW as being female to emotionally/hormonely compensate for how physically powerful they are, in like a Dune's Fish Speaker way. I personally hated it, as it's pretty  . It's also a bit revealing about transhumanism; for all it's liberatory pretense, it's the most bioreductionist ideology around; it's not for nothing it's popular in the crowd.
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Aug 14, 2019 18:38
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't. So, does EP (whichever one) support taking a flat and going Magos Biologis on it, and then replacing tentacles with mechadendrites? Or the aforementioned "Jovians were right" campaign of Flats In Power Armor Save The Day?
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Aug 14, 2019 19:05
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JcDent posted:Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Strangely enough, EP2 kind of does since morphs have a lot less effect on your character's basic stats, and pretty much anything morphs can do to you, you can accomplish with cyberware, there's nothing too unique about any of the morphs except for the ones that have a size modifier or flexbots. Also catch a bit of the ol' Async since the chargen points saved could provide the Psi-Chi sleights to gain you the pool points that not having a fancy morph denies you.
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Aug 14, 2019 20:08
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juggalo baby coffin posted:there is now a mod for classic doom where you play as this lady:  Young Freud posted:Furies are like the best thing about EP because they turn that whole "WH40K Space Marines are ALWAYS male" on its head, because the biomorphs are RAW as being female to emotionally/hormonely compensate for how physically powerful they are, in like a Dune's Fish Speaker way. StratGoatCom posted:I personally hated it, as it's pretty There was a mild case of, "but i'm playing a dude fury." in the EP1 circles (poo poo, I did it once or twice) I gamed with a few years ago. And despite me liking beefy women punching things, I took Olympians and modded them out, EP1 furies were massively overcosted. (And even more tedious than "no girl space marines" is "Okay, girl marines, but they all look like dudes"  , there's a lot of awful folks who can only parse the presence of women as sexualized pinup object or desexed functional blob-human unfit for their attentions and nothing in between)
Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 20:16
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Jerik posted:O GOD MAKE IT STOP I think I popped a blood vessel in my eye. You're doing good work but jesus loving christ this book. I only got like halfway through the first post. Just loving GAH. I think I have a shock of white hair now. It's just. So. Wrong. Everywhere. I'll try to post more of a response but it's just so exhausting. And it's missing so much cool poo poo that would actually work! Where are the jiangshi? How are there not stats for magic coin swords???? I'm frustrated and baffled.
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Aug 14, 2019 20:27
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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Kobolds Ate My Baby! is a “Beer & Pretzels Role-Playing Game” first published in 1999 by Chris O’Neill and Dan Landis of 9th Level Games. According to Chris at the 20th anniversary “Midnight Massacre”, the two had originally planned on putting out a more serious traditional RPG, set in its own fantasy world, at Gen Con ’99. Which was a bit overshadowed by the announcement of a little thing called Dungeons & Dragons 3E. After lots of drinking and despondency, the two ended up writing a “joke” game about kobolds eating babies, sold out of their initial run, and have been going ever since. Two years later they put out a streamlined “Third Edition” version of the rules running under the “BEER System*”, John Kovalic got attached to do their art, and the two together have defined the game line ever since. While the original and third edition books were little zine-printed B&W things, the most recent edition…well, is the 20th anniversary reprint of Third Edition. But the most “modern” version of the rules is KAMB!: In Color!!! (yes, with three exclamation points) and before that was the “Super Deluxx Edition”, and both of those are proper, bound, half-size books. Helpful if misleading chart from the Kickstarter (that obfuscates early-edition shame by presenting Third Edition as the original):  ABOUT KAMB! Kobolds Ate My Baby! has you playing as kobolds, which are very explicitly not the little scaly wannabe-dragons of “modern” D&D; instead, these hew closer to the OD&D / Wizardry presentation of tiny dog people. They’re little orange balls of claws and teeth, they bark and yip, they’re always hungry, and they’re dumb as a bag of rocks. They live in caves under the rule of King Torg (more on him in a minute), and are sent out to raid and explore in order to sate his mighty appetite. And no, not the Pathfinder kind of “appetite”; KAMB! is a jokey comedy game, not a Magical Realm, and the kobolds therein are presented as mostly sexless prepubescent things. To go back to Pathfinder, think if goblins were even less of a threat, and didn’t have the memetic focus on dogs and fire and really they’re just violent little toddlers.  They’re also prone to dying quickly and horribly, which is in fact a big focus of the game. More on that later, although I will note that there was a real concern at Gen Con that they would run out of character sheets. ABOUT THIS REVIEW This isn’t intended to be a fully-objective, “interacting with the material as an outside observer” kind of review. I was introduced to this weird-rear end game by an old issue of Valkyrie, which pitted the titular kobolds against a farm full of angry chickens. From there I’ve followed and played and run off-and-on for nearly two decades, and finally got my chance to participate in the Midnight Massacre during this past Gen Con**, which is what inspired me to finally sit down and review this as a game, not just an RPG book. In my opinion, many of the more “jokey” or “beer and pretzels” RPGs are written from the perspective of making the reader chuckle, rather than with an eye towards how the game actually plays out once it hits the table. That’s my goal with this review: I want to focus on how the game shakes out in practice, what works and what doesn’t. And so, I’ll end this intro post with my first note along those lines: hey, remember how I mentioned King Torg earlier? Well, his name is actually written – every time – as “King Torg (ALL HAIL KING TORG!)”. That’s because it’s a call-and-response among the players and GM; any time the players hear “King Torg”, failure to respond with an “ALL HAIL KING TORG” results in an in-game penalty for the inattentive player’s character. This, sorry to say, gets old the second or third time reading it, and plays like dogshit – especially, say, in a big convention hall where multiple games are going on at once and someone is yelling “ALL HAIL KING TORG” every thirty seconds. My GM at Gen Con got halfway into his first sentence of description before being interrupted, and promptly suspended the rule for his table for the rest of the game. At a small table, with friends, preferably in a common room or a Waffle House? Eh, it’s still not the best, but it’s okay for setting expectations: this game gets rowdy, kobolds’ lives are short, and the GM is expected to be capriciously dickish. *adapted as the SAKE System back when 9th Level had the Ninja Burger RPG license **where my kobolds Jar’jarth and Shrek II: The Movie did quite well for themselves before dying horribly, TYVM AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Aug 27, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 20:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'll try to post more of a response but it's just so exhausting. And it's missing so much cool poo poo that would actually work! Where are the jiangshi? How are there not stats for magic coin swords???? I was going to say that the jiangshi were in the first-edition Oriental Adventures... but I just checked and, to my surprise, they're not. Huh. As one of the best known monsters of Chinese tradition, I would have thought they'd be included there, but for some reason they aren't, although a number of much less famous monsters are. To give some background for anyone not aware of it, Oriental Adventures was a book written mostly by David "Zeb" Cook (though only Gary Gygax's name appears on the front cover) and released in 1985, five years after Deities & Demigods; it's a mishmash of stuff that Cook says in his introduction is "drawn from Japan, China, Korea, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines." In practice, it's mostly Japanese-flavored, with seven of the nine new character classes and two of the three new races having Japanese names, for instance. There are a few monsters from other Asian cultures, though, and one class has a Chinese name: a spellcasting class called the wu jen, which I'm guessing comes from 巫人 (wū rén in pinyin; wu jen in Wade-Giles), though I have no idea if that's really a common Chinese term—though for what it's worth it does have an entry in Wiktionary. The jiangshi would finally appear in D&D, under the name "hopping vampire", in the 3E Oriental Adventures, which was kind of a mess (even more so than the 1E version, I mean) in that it tried to include South Asia as well, because trying to cover China, Japan, Thailand, and all the other different countries of East and Southeast Asia in one relatively thin book wasn't enough and they had to try to cram in India and its neighbors too. Also in that instead of the D&D campaign setting of Kara Tur, it for some reason used as its default setting Rokugan, the setting of Legend of the Five Rings, which was not owned by Wizards of the Coast. (WotC had of course licensed the rights to allow it to legally make reference to the setting, but that license has long since expired, and I'm not sure why they thought it was a good idea to do that in the first place.)
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Aug 14, 2019 21:51
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Young Freud posted:Furies are like the best thing about EP because they turn that whole "WH40K Space Marines are ALWAYS male" on its head, because the biomorphs are RAW as being female to emotionally/hormonely compensate for how physically powerful they are, in like a Dune's Fish Speaker way. No there's some serious biotruths horseshit in this, trust me it's not doing what you think it's doing. It's also dumb even by the standards of the setting because of the degree to which transhumanity has control over human biology and the casual use of psychosurgery. edit: poo poo, beaten, oh well should have finished reading all the newposts. JcDent posted:Damned if you do, damned if you don't. This is actually one of the things EP gets more or less correct in that it's usually easier to create a new organism from scratch than modify an older one with whatever weird enhancements you want. It also makes some sense in the setting because once you're done with your old body the logical thing is to sell it off on the secondary market to recoup the cost of the new one (or just fork yourself into it but whatever, I don't want to open that can of worms for now). Which explains why there are so drat many 'gently-used' weird morphs circulating around. That is to say, you can still do what you want, but it's sort of considered sub-optimal. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 21:57
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Xiahou Dun posted:magic coin swords????
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Aug 14, 2019 22:04
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Zereth posted:Please tell me more about magic coin swords. A sword made of coins tied together around an iron rod was used to ward off and fight evil powers. Also, yes, this is a British Museum link, so odds are this particular sword is hella stolen.
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Aug 14, 2019 22:06
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Neat!
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Aug 14, 2019 22:20
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JcDent posted:Where's the "useful idiots for a massive corporation" angle? edit: Even if I'm wrong, I still enjoy the therians as a perfectly disposable bad guy you don't have to think twice about fragging. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 23:16
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Ronwayne posted:That, and the omnipresent, casual opportunities for mass mind rape, are part of what the make large chunks of the setting too toxic to want to play in, hence my preference for exoplanet focused stuff. At a certain point, the answer to "wHaT mAkEs YoU a PeRsOn?!?!?" is "gently caress it, I'm tired and everything is so nasty and lovely and mean that I don't care anymore." I could see a use for the setting in GURPS Infinite Worlds - some odd hosed up thing that both Homeline and Centrum or their analogs in some other universe jumping game - is there alternates to that? I'd love to see them, if there are - both came across that system - they call it Bostrom-1 or some  shite like that - and had a mutual  after finding out what happened and came to a mutual agreement that this place Was Not To Be Touched for fear of the Big E or possibly worse, the natives getting access to parachronic tech and spreading everywhere.
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Aug 15, 2019 00:19
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StratGoatCom posted:I could see a use for the setting in GURPS Infinite Worlds - some odd hosed up thing that both Homeline and Centrum or their analogs in some other universe jumping game - is there alternates to that? I'd love to see them, if there are - both came across that system - they call it Bostrom-1 or some Also good lord save us from another round of "the real power to take is being super smart and using STEM skills to match/cancel/replace whatever the domestic superpower source is." That's up there with "what if gods, like, needed worship for magic points?" in terms of "remember the 90s?"
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Aug 15, 2019 00:27
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I mean, on one hand a not entirely accurate treatment of biology and not making sense within the setting, but on the other hand, best soldiers in the setting are mostly female-bodied and also it grates the gently caress out of hardcore misogynists. Also I get maximum blessing from the setting for playing a rad soldier lady! 
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Aug 15, 2019 00:35
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Nessus posted:I think they both already act this way about Reich-5 (guess what that one is) and this weird bizarro one where there's like ubiquitous digital spying technology and some kind of neo-feudalism. They also get that way about Caliph but that's because Caliph is basically "the Islamic Golden Age never ended: it's 16XX and they have interstellar colonies. May Allah requite thee abundantly." One of those things that tells you what year the book was most decisively written before. I've got a vague curse that as soon as I see something, I can imagine a scenario for it. Having reread Infinite worlds, I think Bostrom-1 is a singularly hard world to operate in, as baseline humans stand out hard, only beaten by non-native enhanced humans. They mostly keep an eye on things with cheap as poo poo camera drones, switching over to whatever can be farted out with the few replicators they've stolen, as everyone was getting a bit twitchy about the lowtech camera drones that folks had started finding in orbit in various areas. The place has only one factor overcoming the danger that makes them keep any real interest, and that's that for whatever reason (TITAN assholery, probably) conveyors end up landing on Mars rather then Earth, which is a potentially very interesting source of knowledge about the underlying physics of parachronic travel. What Homeline doesn't know is that a few Centrum Shuttles have gone missing here, they having suspended their exploration operation slower then Homeline. Firewall has one of the shuttles, as well as custody of the braintapes of a few of the crew, and has it's Crows and Vectors poking both with sticks; the the thing was taken before self-destruct charges could be fired - the thing is damaged, but reparable. What keeps Firewall worrying is where the hell any other shuttles may have ended up, and what the hell else might be dropping in... LatwPIAT posted:I mean, on one hand a not entirely accurate treatment of biology and not making sense within the setting, but on the other hand, best soldiers in the setting are mostly female-bodied and also it grates the gently caress out of hardcore misogynists. While recreating a classic trope?  Frankly, it seems to be more of the nerdlinger thing for Hawt Warrior Womenz then any real subversion.
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Aug 15, 2019 02:57
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LatwPIAT posted:I mean, on one hand a not entirely accurate treatment of biology and not making sense within the setting, but on the other hand, best soldiers in the setting are mostly female-bodied and also it grates the gently caress out of hardcore misogynists. IIRC, Furies aren't as stat-heavy as Remades, but they're the probably the toughest physically out of all the biomorphs. I think they rank as the second-toughest morph after the Reaper, which is basically a flying tank turret.
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Aug 15, 2019 03:23
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StratGoatCom posted:
Unfortunately, In my experience the raw misogyny outweighs that nerdlinger fetish, and more than a few times i've seen lovely nerds come to the same conclusion as the loving Tleilaxu that in a transhuman setting they could just get rid of women but keep dudes around, not just in the military but across the entire society. (This was around 2014 when the Dark Enlightenment dorks and other fash psudeointellectuals had come out of the woodwork and before they had been shoved aside in 2016 by the hooting, braying fash demographic that did not need psudeointellectual bullshit to justify their hatred.) Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Aug 15, 2019 |
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Aug 15, 2019 03:31
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Mors Rattus posted:Best Boy Reuben did nothing wrong, ever, even when inventing non-kosher sandwiches. You can make kosher reubens. I used to eat them all the time because actual jewish restaurants aren't gonna make non kosher food. Non kosher ones are way better.
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Aug 15, 2019 08:35
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AmiYumi posted:In my opinion, many of the more “jokey” or “beer and pretzels” RPGs are written from the perspective of making the reader chuckle, rather than with an eye towards how the game actually plays out once it hits the table.
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Aug 15, 2019 14:19
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The other problem with late-era WEG games was that the writers weren't funny, so the games weren't funny to read, either.
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Aug 15, 2019 15:05
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Aberrant D20 Edition This gun of light can eradicate anything, even Gods! As per Hunter, one of these will be the character made based entirely on mechanical concerns with a silly backstory, and the other will be the character built to be the way Aberrant wants you to be. The gulf in power between these two Novas will be, uh, impressive. First up will be our superscience marvel. Since we're given no point-buy system or alternate attribute generation system, we'll have to roll 4d6 6 times drop lowest for her. She gets a 16, a 16, a 12, an 11, a 14, and a 16. This can be worked with! She wants to max her Quantum, but she also gets +2 Con before calculating Quantum from being a Nova. So she'll take 16 Str, 16 Int, and put her 14 in Con and raise it to 16. She'll also take 16 Dex, 11 Charisma, and 12 Wis. This means she starts with a 3 Quantum, which raises to 4 from being level 3. Any Mega is now +4 to her stats, she has a lot of PP, and she's generally an extremely powerful Nova. She selects Scholar as her first class (to get way more SP at level 1), and for her initial 2 Feats and 1 Power Slot (She gets the Human Bonus Feat and SP, they say as much) she takes Mega Int (Mental Prodigy), Mega Dex (Fast Tasks; she can build devices and things much faster!), and Mega Con (Regeneration). No Quantum Powers needed; these will do nicely. That takes her immediately to 20 Int, 20 Con, and 20 Dex. She spends her 48 Skillpoints, making sure to focus on Knowledge (Technology) and Craft (Mechanical), but she'll throw in skills like Research, Demolitions, Computer Use, etc. You don't need her every Skillpoint. She has many! She also spends her first free Background on Gadget. Also takes her Scholar starting Feat as I dunno, Investigator. They're all pretty worthless. And selects Technology as her Knowledge Focus; free +2 to that. She then takes a Warrior level. This would normally be a bad idea (multiclassing), but A: Her stats are going to be so goddamn high, you don't even know and B: She'll basically be alternating Warrior and Scholar every other level to keep using the Scholar Levels to pointbuy to the max the stuff she cares about in between learning to smash faces. While she is, for now, immensely more dexterous than strong, she's going to do melee because it's way more powerful than ranged. Also taking a Warrior level gets her Brawl (+1 to hit unarmed, Unarmed does more non-lethal damage) and Personal Firearms for free, so that's nice. She'll also take Combat Martial Arts as her Fighter Bonus Feat just so she doesn't eat AoOs every time she punches someone. Yeah, she could do better mechanically, but eh. Science-lady just being able to punch a guy through a building is funny to me, so it stays. Scholar 2 is where she becomes a God. She takes the second rank of Gadget for her bonus Background Feat. Now she can take a 'device' with 10 Enhancements. The device is 'My Awesome Genome'. She selects 2 ranks of Brain Augmentation for +4 Int, an Exoskeleton Transplantation for +4 AC and DR 2/- (She's thick-skinned and naturally armored under her skin), Subdermal Chitin Implants for +3 AC and DR 1/- (Stacks), then 2 ranks of +Dex, 2 ranks of +Con, and 2 ranks of +Str. She comes out of The Chamber with a 24 Int, 24 Dex, 24 Con, 20 Str, 12 Wis, and 11 Cha. And AC +7 (which stacks with worn armor, class defense bonus, and dex bonus) and DR 3/-. She also gets a Power and Feat slot here, and spends the Feat slot on Invent Device; now she can make whatevs to do whatevs, and her Int and Research checks are so high she can already fairly easily build things that represent 3rd level powers if she ever needs Quantum Powers like a fool. She also takes Mega Str as her Power, because a 24 Str sounds fun, and grabs Crush; she can choose to make an attack unarmed for 1 PP once a round that adds 2xQuantum melee damage and becomes Lethal. She can just kinda...rip a guy in half like a phone book. Now our Science Heroine just needs a pithy backstory. Megan Westerbrook began life as a humble grad student, working for a Nova professor and fetching coffee while he scampered around and pretended to solve every mystery in the universe. One day, he asked her to step inside a chamber he'd designed for a moment to 'calibrate' something; this was the Genetic Enhancement Chamber, and the stress of having her body remade into a power beyond human imagining caused her to Erupt. Now she is DR. Megan Westerbrook (having finished her PhD in 7 days after her Eruption) and with that influx of legitimacy and genetic power, she has set out to prepare mankind for the disaster she has foreseen in the next 12-17 years: She is convinced the world is going to be invaded by some kind of lovely alien wizard-god and his legions. She wades into the world of Nova Politics to gather the funds and legitimacy to convince Project Utopia of the need for some kind of 'Earth Defense Force', and also to build a totally sweet kill-sat laser that she can watch the eventual invasion from. It's good to have hobbies. Next, let's build the guy Aberrant wants you to make. First, let's see his stats. 10, 18, 11, 12, 13, 14. Not bad. Also, rolled 6666 for that 18! Weird. He's going to be a guy with an office job who always dreamed of being a rock star, and now he's got the Nova powers to do it. So we'll say he's 10 Str, 13 Dex, 11 (13) Con, 12 Int, 18 Wis, 14 Cha. He's sharp and pretty decent with people. His Quantum would actually be 0, but it starts at 1 automatically, +1 for being level 3. He's not good at Quantum because his character concept didn't jack up the key stats. He will pay for this. He'll just take Entertainer for all 3 classes, which makes things easier and it's what he dreams of. For his Background feats, he'll take a Eufiber costume at rank 1, and Cipher at rank 1; nobody really knows of him yet, and his old background as an office worker is mostly hidden. For his Entertainer bonus feat, he'll take Persuasive (best of a bunch of bad options). For his Human and level Feats, he'll take Mega Charisma (Awe Inspiring) and Mega Wisdom (Hyper-Enhanced Hearing), and Mega Int (Enhanced Memory). Yeah, leaning hard on the Megas, but for a guy who is solely trying to be a diplomatic rock star type there's not much else in the Feat list that can compare. Plus, this forms a flavorful little set: He makes a big impression, but he's also legitimately a superhumanly talented musician and he can remember anything he's heard from one listen or glance. For actual powers, he'll take Empathic Manipulation (He can heighten emotional impacts, or calm people down) and because he's maximum sparkly decent guy, Healing (He can heal you with the power of rock). He takes general bard skills for his various Skillpoints and stuff, and he's a way simpler character than Dr. Minmax up there. He's also on a wholly different power scale. Michael Hawk was a completely normal office drone. He went to college, got an MBA instead of studying music like he wanted to, and generally did the sensible things to get a sensible job that paid a sensible wage that he sensibly hated. His one real stress valve was his hobby: Metal. Quiet office drone on weekdays, guitarist in an amateur band with his friends on the weekends. It was enough to make his life bearable. Until one day, out of nowhere, he complained of a terrible headache; everything just seemed so loud. He had Erupted for no reason at all, seemingly given power by the whimsical hand of fate; his dreams were dropped right in front of him, there to try to take. Of course he'd pick them up and run with them. His hyper-enhanced hearing (which he's slowly learned to control), his superhuman talent, and his enhanced memory and ability to help others feel what he wants them to feel (not to mention his ability to somehow stimulate healing and recovery by sound waves; quantum bullshit can do whatever it wants) have given him a new lease on life. He's quit his office job and set out to try to get on N! and make a name as a hot new Nova performer, hoping to wow crowds and share the music in his heart. How he'll end up with the crazy superhuman lady who wants to build a death satellite to defeat aliens is unknown, but in case the aliens will instead be defeated by popular music and the power of love, he'll be along for the ride. So there. Look at the scale of difference between them. Even if I wasn't abusing the Invent Organism RAW stuff and how it interacts with gadget, Dr. Westerbrook would be way stronger than Mr. Hawk. Mr. Hawk is still a fun concept for a character, and could still be fun to play, but he lives entirely in the non-combat system, which is really not the focus of d20. His powers are all about singing and playing guitar and inventing new genres of music, except the healing. Meanwhile, Dr. Westerbrook can simulate extremely 'powerful' Quantum powers (they're not actually that great) while having sky high stats and being good at fighting and non-fighting stuff. All the Superhuman stuff does is introduce another fiddly layer of optimization to d20's tons of fiddly layers of optimization. It doesn't really make someone feel like a God; Westerbrook is getting as much or more out of abusing Gadget as she is out of her actual powers. She is pretty goddamn crazy for 3rd level, though. Next Time: Why These People Don't Matter
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Aug 15, 2019 15:33
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Also, something I forgot that makes Superscience even better: You can expend Power Points when making a research check (no limit on how many) to reduce the time you need by 3 days per PP. So Westerbrook up there with her 25 PP can just dump all of them (and get them back easily, because remember, they recover per hour spent not working or whatever, and a 'day' of research is an 8-10 hour day) to knock 75 days off most devices she's working on. And then Fast Tasks makes her much faster at building them, so even the limitation she's supposed to have isn't really there. Hell, if she's willing to spend some HP (and she has a lot, with a +8 Con Mod) she can throw even more at it due to the poorly thought out 2 HP is 1 PP rule. She's got 41 HP at level 3, she can take some hits to her health for the cause of building a totally sweet laser satellite. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Aug 15, 2019 |
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Aug 15, 2019 16:09
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 So, we're on to actually running the game, which is closest to what I've been trying to look at in these posts. It's an interesting take; it's lower level than in most other books, which does mean it skirts obviousness at times, but at the same time some points that are made are perfectly valid. The first section is on conveying information, but oddly the first subjection isn't about conveying information, it's about asking questions. The first tip is on the use of leading questions by the GM; that leading questions should be used to make the players curious and activate, rather than making them overly cautious. Unfortunately, there's no actual methods for doing this, only a bunch of examples; and while it's correct that questions like "does anyone keep an eye on the prisoner?" can encourage caution, examples of positive questions include "do you look in all the drawers?" and "does anyone activate the device?" which could easily be just as bad. What makes this more awkward is that the next section states "leading questions aren't the best way to interact with players" (so maybe don't put them front-and-centre in your section on the topic?) and that open ended questions are preferable, and multiple-choice questions and confirmations should usually be avoided. Fair enough, although multiple-choice is sometimes needed in quieter or more thoughtful groups. Answering questions has again some good basics: if you don't know the answer to a question, consider how important the answer is and how long it will take to look up, and decide to either look it up or make up something and record it for consistency. If the players ask questions which their PCs wouldn't know the answers to, ask "how do you find out?" Cool. There's then a rather odd one, though: quote:When describing actions or events, you want to be on top of the conversation. It shouldn’t be triggered by a player question. In other words, you want a player to say, “We walk down the corridor” with you replying, “When you get halfway down its length, an alarm sounds! Suddenly android guards start shuffling out of the now-open door.” What you don’t want is for a player to say, “We walk 10 feet down the corridor. Does anything happen?” And then repeat that over and over. Stay ahead of the players. Tell them what they experience before they feel like they have to ask. On the one hand, that's a fair point. On the other hand, I've very rarely known any new player to talk like that. That's much more likely to be a player who's massively on the defensive because last time they walked down a corridor they ended up way closer to the androids than they thought they would be, which is a whole different ball game. Likewise, the following section on Interacting with one player versus the group basically says that if you end up with a group caller for the PCs, just go with it because if the other PCs don't like it, "it's their duty to pay attention and interject". Which ignores all the social and game ability factors that could end up preventing that, which again can be a minefield. If it was clear that the advice was for new GMs not to jump into that minefield, then fair enough, but it doesn't read like that. There follows a lengthy session on pacing, which is one of my biggest weaknesses and points of confusion so I'm always keen to read it. It begins with the reasonable advice that you should always know what the ongoing goal or theme of the game is, and then a section on pacing within an encounter which says that if you want to spend extra time on an important event, that's cool, but you need to make sure there's enough detail to fill that time. Again, half true, half false - it can run into big problems if the PCs don't agree that the event is important, and there's a lot of missing depth in dealing with that. Even Alas Vegas made the point that, in spite of all the careful preparation of the final scene, some players would just straight up shoot the Chairman the second they step out of the elevator and to some extent that makes sense, so spin out the lead up to that scene. But that's making the key point that this section misses, which is that the players can easily override your decisions on how important a scene is. Pacing within a session is closer to this - it actually still covers decisions on what encounters to play out in detail or skip over, but does it within the context of the overall session - as does the next section, err, pacing encounters and sessions together. The objective is to avoid players thinking they didn't actually get much done in a session (although unfortunately there's no mention of what happens if the players end up thinking they did too much). But what it doesn't address, and what no such section ever manages to address, is the issue of optimal pacing potentially removing agency from the players and giving it to the clock. The constant claim that player creativity should be rewarded, but apparently not by any means that involves actually accomplishing a goal more quickly. There's a similar one on pacing within a campaign which says more or less the same thing, and also asks the GM to manage the bizarre feat of breaking a campaign into sessions without plotting out what will happen in advance, because the players should be making those choices. There's a brief section on ending a campaign, which essentially says you should plan for a reasonable ending and that if it looks like OOC circumstances are going to force the campaign to end, at least tell the players that explicitly and try to discuss with them what should or shouldn't be wrapped up. That could work in some circumstances, but probably not others (depending on how long the campaign lasted and how far it got). Ensuring player agency is our next major section.. but unfortunately, we're again back to the habit of taking a large number of words to say something fairly simple and covering it in wool so that its meaning is reduced. What the section comes down to is to make sure that players have enough information to choose between options meaningfully. There's then a section on avoiding routinely taking away the PC's cool stuff, which is a good point, but not necessarily to do with agency, and then the awkward: quote:Rather than negate their abilities, require them. If a character can phase through walls, don’t set up the villain’s fortress so that the walls prevent phasing. Instead, make it so that phasing is literally the only way the PCs can get in. Yea, we need some more detail on that Mr Cook, like what the heck the other PCs do, or how that's set up while still letting the villain get in and out, and so on. There's then another overly fluffy section on Nonplayer characters. Do we really need to define what a "one-time NPC" is, beyond knowing what NPC stands for? There's the usual advice to run NPCs based on their own interests rather than as game pawns, which usually falls down unless a game is very well balanced and PCs are very well integrated, and then a note on villains and how they should use all their resources to get what they want. Which is again, not really helpful without advice on switching between the "GM" and "villain" hats and how the villain should be limited by game concerns when the GM hat is on. Plus, it advises that villains should be "the heroes of their own stories", which sounds like a good literary trope but as anyone who's watched Maleficent can tell you, it can also make them a less iconic character and lower the satisfaction in defeating them. Plenty of players want to defeat the bad guy and feel that justice has triumphed over needless cruelty and chaos, not that the villain maybe had a point but we had a point too and we had bigger swords so might made right. Even a Simple Game is Fun is another excellent point - that you don't need to write a long and complex plot, because players will have their own ideas, and also (big groan coming up) there might be memorable moments that come up and take you by surprise. Ron Edwards readers will groan at that one, with his comments on "ouija board playing", and while - as with a ton of stuff Edwards wrote - it's a bit overgeneral and sledgehammered, it is a legitimate concern. Plus, he also forgot how back in the pacing section he mentioned we need to have a bunch of extra encounters ready to allow for things going too fast. Finding Inspiration. Read newspapers, rip off classic fiction, move fiction from other genres into yours, and take examples from life. There we go; that takes Cook 3 pages. There's then a much more interesting section, though - what happens if there's a surprise and you need ideas and development suddenly in the middle of a session. Cool! What do we do then, Mr Cook? Ok, you're telling us that it's a good thing. Next you're telling us that we can take a break if need be. Ok, but what do we do in the break? Ah, now we're having a list of tools that we could use to help. Well, that's interesting, but help us do what? What do we do with the tools? Oh.. the section ended. Huh. And the tools are a bit cheesy. Number one is a Tarot deck, oh, hey there again Alas Vegas! It also suggests using a Magic deck if you don't have one, but we're obviously really thinking of the Sooth deck from Invisible Sun at this point, even though it's not listed by name. Other tools: an artbook; a list of random words (that goes right back to Robin Laws and Weather The Cuckoo Likes at least), or a random published adventure. But nothing about integrating these. Ugh. There's also a sidebar on using Chandler's Law, but it casually mentions that introducing a sudden unplanned danger can result in dead PCs or an unbalanced encounter, and so you should.. uh, hang on, it doesn't say what to do, it just says it can happen. Nothing on Chandler's Flaw either, although that's probably a bit grognardy. Focussing on things other than combat is another potentially valuable section, but lacks a lot of detail. First, it says that you should consider awarding XP for non-combat activities to get the players interested in them, which is.. well, not entirely valid (Shadowrun doesn't give XP for combat, but it's still notorious for devolving into it), but reasonable. Then, there's a section on things that could take the place of combat, which is a good idea, but the first three - unfortunately - are too similar. Discovery, Mystery, and Horror. All of these essentially come down to "exploration" - another Edwards term - and how interesting it is can vary dramatically with how it's run and set up, which.. we don't have any data on. Why is horror a form of exploration? Because the section is rather oddly worded to imply that horror means working out a way to defeat the big horrible monster which you can't fight. Understandable, since being scared of the monster and running the heck away from it isn't going to be a major focus for advancing the plot, but still, a bit weird. The other two are Action and Interaction, and to be fair it does point out the issue with action scenes as being that most game systems don't document them as well as combat. Does it tell us how to rectify that? No, of course not. Just "use a skill check or whatever mechanic". And you already know what interaction's going to say - all the standard things that can happen in a negotiation. Now it's time for something silly again. Practical Concerns - starts by saying you need notes and a campaign journal and oh look, although it's not mentioned in the text, here's a quarter page photo of the Your Best Game Ever branded player and GM notebooks. They were a stretch goal on the Kickstarter and apparently contained "room for all the details of your PCs and adventures and are system agnostic". So.. um.. blank paper then? Nothing's said it's not.. There's a more reasonable section on GM screens, saying that they should generally be used only if you need the information that's on the inside. There's a sidebar on dice fudging which basically spends a column trying to desperately say "yes, fudge your dice rolls" without actually saying those words and admitting the potential design problem. So, there's a lot of reasonable statements here, but far too much frantically spinning to avoid actually saying anything positive. Plenty of lists to things to be concerned about with no statement about what to do about that concern, or statements of both sides of an issue without an opinion in either direction, or - much more importantly - the effect of taking one side or the other and the need to integrate that with the group. This is definitely the "dumb centrist" version of GMing advice, which is a little sad, but probably understandable if the main interest was just to sell to the mass market.
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Aug 15, 2019 16:28
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Kobolds Ate My Baby!: Part II – BEER Engine Basics Basic Rules I will give this game credit: the basic mechanic is explained on the very first page of rules text. It won’t be very clear until a little further into character creation, but it’s there: when you want to do something, roll XD6 and compare it to one of your kobold’s stats. Equal or lower, you succeed; higher, you fail. The “X” is equal to the difficulty of the roll, assigned by the GM (properly called the Mayor in this game, which I may or may not remember to do) based on stats / skills / circumstance / whimsy. Following that is an alphabetical dictionary of the important rules terms, which isn’t particularly helpful reading in-order but is okay for quickly looking up terms after finishing chargen, and then the rest of character creation. BEER As mentioned, KAMB! runs on what is termed the BEER Engine, so named because those are the four stats that govern nearly every roll you the player are going to make in the game. They are, in order: Brawn (how big and beefy your kobold is), Ego (because giving kobolds an “Intelligence” stat would be something of an exaggeration), Extraneous (all things not applicable to being properly kobold-y, so mostly charisma), and Reflexes (how fast and wiggly your little guy is). Traditionally these were generated by rolling 2d6 down-the-line, which is still presented in KAMB! In Color!!!, but it recommends (and I agree) just choosing from a 10/8/6/4 array*. Get used to those D6s, by the way, because those are in most cases the only dice used in this game. From there, we go to quasi-stats**. Each stat has one, they’re all calculated the same way, and they serve as the difficulty to rolls against your kobold. They’re calculated by dividing the related stat by 4, rounded up; 1-4 gets you a quasi-stat of 1, 5-8 is 2, and so on. As for what they are and do: Meat is derived from Brawn and adds to HP and melee damage as well as determining the difficulty of shoving your kobold around, Cunning is derived from Ego and determines the difficulty to trick or swindle your kobold, Luck is derived from Extraneous and is used to determine the difficulty of things happening to your kobold that come down to luck (or when the Mayor can’t decide what other stat to use; it can also be spent permanently to force a single reroll by anyone at any time in-game) , and Agility is derived from Reflexes and determines the difficulty to hit your kobold. Before we get to Skills, there are three remaining “stats” to deal with. Hits are your HP, simple as that, and begin equal to your kobold’s Brawn + Meat. VP are Victory Points, gained by accomplishing goals and killing and/or eating things, and can be spent back at the caves in ways to be explained later. Finally, Kobold Horrible Death Cheques. These can be gained all sorts of ways: failing skill rolls, using certain skills at all, acting in an un-kobold-ly fashion, annoying the Mayor, etc. Kobolds are little bundles of chaos and short lifespans and accumulating these are as bad as they are inevitable. Each gain (or loss) of a KHDC forces a roll of 2D6 + your kobold’s (new) KHDC total; a 13 or lower is a pass, while rolling over that results in bad things. Usually instant death, sometimes to more than just the kobold that triggered it. Sometimes they’re technically survivable, though! There’s lots of charts and situations in the Mayor’s section later on, and supplements and adventures tend to have more. *it also gives out one KHDC for putting that 10 in Brawn, or one VP for putting it in Extraneous **yes, that’s the term they use  putting in a picture to break up all the text, and it appears here-ish in the book anyway How Does It Play? So, the random stats don’t feel great, that much is true. It does lend a degree of disposability to kobolds, and encourages the kind of madcap play the game is built around; if your kobold is terrible, being a reckless little idiot will bring you that much closer to the next one – maybe that one will have better stats! There’s also something of a two-tiered system going on; as mentioned, your kobolds can gain KHDC for using certain skills at all. The trick is, those skills are the ones that skip rolling entirely and just automatically do their effect, at the cost of gaining a KHDC. So if your kobold has a particularly low stat, properly choosing your skills can serve as a workaround, while still dragging your kobold closer to their inevitable doom. It isn’t perfect, because every kobold takes KHDC, but it’s something. Next time: Skills, Equipment, and Audience Participation! AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Aug 27, 2019 |
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Aug 15, 2019 21:13
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hyphz posted:
There have been times when I've specifically planned around a PC's favored tactic or ability, only to have that PC inexplicably forget they had that ability when it would have been most useful. One example that comes to mind involves a long-running 3E D&D campaign in which the party wizard made a habit of magically scouting out dungeons in advance. I don't recall the exact spell he was using—and, to be honest, it's entirely possible that I never read the spell description carefully to make sure it worked the way he wanted it to work, and I may have been letting him get away with something he shouldn't be able to do—but he would invisibly and intangibly explore the dungeon alone in relative safety, find the most direct route to where the party needed to go, and then let them know how to get there so they could avoid dead ends and pointless side treks. Okay, so near the end of the campaign I designed a dungeon with a large, twisted maze, which I put there with the expectation the party wouldn't have to explore it. The wizard had been scouting out every dungeon so far; I had every reason to believe that he'd do the same here; he'd quickly find the fastest way through the maze, and the party could avoid the worst of it and feel good about bypassing such a tortuous setpiece. Instead, for some reason the wizard didn't scout out the dungeon ahead of time this time, and the party was left tediously slogging their way through the maze while I was wondering why the wizard had chosen this one time not to do what he'd consistently done for the last twenty dungeons...
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Aug 16, 2019 01:38
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Kobolds Ate My Baby! has a lot of issues with being a comedy game focused on comedy over game but god drat the design of the kobolds themselves loving slap.
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Aug 16, 2019 02:30
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How many brawn 10 kobolds do you need to meaningfully threaten a grown human civilian?
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Aug 16, 2019 03:15
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I like how every time Cook starts to stray from the obvious and well-worn DM advice the reader could very easily get elsewhere he inevitably drifts back into weird cargo cult mentality and Tarot decks and before you know it I'm just reading everything he's written in Doctor Orpheus' voice again. How has Cook been a professional game designer for the better part of three decades, yet hasn't seemed to have really learned anything from it?
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Aug 16, 2019 03:33
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That seems monstrously unkind to a luminary like Dr. Byron Orpheus.
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Aug 16, 2019 03:43
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KingKalamari posted:I like how every time Cook starts to stray from the obvious and well-worn DM advice the reader could very easily get elsewhere he inevitably drifts back into weird cargo cult mentality and Tarot decks and before you know it I'm just reading everything he's written in Doctor Orpheus' voice again. How has Cook been a professional game designer for the better part of three decades, yet hasn't seemed to have really learned anything from it? It's been my experience that the general rpg community is reactionary and invested in their dogma. I've known people that will happily expound upon the foolishness of world religions and then recite from dnd or 40k books like they were scripture. The experience of watching a cargo cult develop in front of your eyes is very surreal. On top of that, fun is subjective. You can get people who have been gaming for thirty years the same lovely garbage way, but they enjoy it so who's to say what works? By and large, look at the media that sells the best, most of them are dog poo poo. edit: also, what Night said, Orpheus doesn't deserve that. edit 2: There's that stereotype, much beloved in the role-playing game community, that we're somehow smarter or maybe more creative than other groups. I have no loving idea where this came from and I've been laughing at it for twenty years. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Aug 16, 2019 |
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Aug 16, 2019 03:43
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Night10194 posted:That seems monstrously unkind to a luminary like Dr. Byron Orpheus. That's fair, but at the same time I can't think of another character who exemplifies the over-dramatic bombast for mundane subjects and furious gesticulation I imagine whenever I read Cook's writing. Also if you told me Monte Cook wears a cape as casual wear I would 100% have no reason not to believe that
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Aug 16, 2019 03:54
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