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Halloween Jack posted:Nightlife You can't say those words without posting the book cover.
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Aug 6, 2021 03:51
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I should make a real effort to convert it to something a little more fun. I mean, the system is okay.
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Aug 6, 2021 03:53
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Nehru the Damaja posted:For what it's worth, what's worth playing in urban fantasy out there? I keep wanting to play something in the genre and the closest I got was two sessions of Changeling before covid killed everything. I have some Vampire 5e books but it seems like a lot to learn before I even try to sell people on it. No one has said Unknown Armies?
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Aug 6, 2021 04:49
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hyphz posted:No one has said Unknown Armies? Hopefully my copy of Unknown Armies will be showing up tomorrow, I'm looking forward to it.
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Aug 6, 2021 04:49
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Unknown Armies is really cool but it lends itself to a very particular style of game, and it's a heavy and unhappy, if hopeful, one. You play Unknown Armies if you want to play Unknown Armies, not if you want to just play urban fantasy in general.
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Aug 6, 2021 05:04
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TG adjacent but salute https://twitter.com/pale_snale/status/1423428085375016964?s=19
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Aug 6, 2021 05:14
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Plutonis posted:TG adjacent but salute That's pretty dang wholesome
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Aug 6, 2021 07:57
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Warthur posted:My own take on FATE Accelerated is that I am unclear on which of two different things it is supposed to be, and I don't think it succeeds so well at being either of them. Fate Accelerated actually has a very solid niche which is neither of those - it's for games where if you tried to use the default skill system for it, everyone would either have nearly identical skills setup, or else where the range of possible skills is so wide that nobody would meaningfully engage with it. That's why the default example in the FAE book is faux-Hogwarts. If you ran it in regular Fate then everyone would would to jack up their Magic skill pretty high, but the FAE approaches match a lot closer to fiction depictions of wizard school where someone is the Clever one, someone is the Flashy one, etc. The answer to the problem of someone trying to use their best approach for everything is to just make clear that different approaches are better for different things. If you Forcefully do something all the time then you'll only get results and reactions from your Forcefulness. The idea that it's 'not enough to hang a campaign off of' is ridiculous because people manage to have whole long campaigns that are totally freeform. I'm not much into FAE myself but there's definite use cases for it. It started life as 'lighter Fate Core' but is really a different build of that engine, meant for different things.
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Aug 6, 2021 07:57
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Nehru the Damaja posted:For what it's worth, what's worth playing in urban fantasy out there? Spire. Very much not what your starting assumptions were, but can you really resist Drow revolutionaries versus High Elf imperialists ?
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Aug 6, 2021 08:05
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Yeah and "the system RAW incentivizes minmaxing or leaning on char strengths in all situations" isn't unique to bad systems. Blades in the dark flat out acknowledges that's a thing and just tells players not to be weasels and play in the spirit of the game, or take an advance like rook's gambit if they want to thematically play up "My character leans into 1 stat to solve every problem even in ways that strain credulity" without breaking the game's resource economy.
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Aug 6, 2021 08:08
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The actual FitD issue is that maxing out your resistances is probably the most powerful thing you can do and can make you immune to most consequences while letting you mostly succeed on retries. But that's also pretty dependent on your group and GM interpret resistance as well as time pressures.
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Aug 6, 2021 09:23
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A mod-suggested crosspost from CC: ArtDome is a monthly forums art challenge. The winner gets to set the next month's challenge and judge the entries. Speaking of Frazetta, this month's ArtDome challenge is-- Tree Bucket posted:we need a card from a non-existent game.
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Aug 6, 2021 09:54
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fool of sound posted:You play Unknown Armies if you want to play Unknown Armies, not if you want to just play urban fantasy in general.
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Aug 6, 2021 14:09
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Tree Bucket posted:A mod-suggested crosspost from CC: drat this is cool. If only I had any artistic talent whatsoever.
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Aug 6, 2021 14:30
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Coolness Averted posted:That's pretty dang wholesome While browsing through Frazetta's catalog of work for ideas I actually started to appreciate how he was a lot more, for lack of a better word, "progressive" he was than a lot of his later imitators. While his work is filled with naked ladies, he was also a lot more even-handed in who he sexualized than people give him credit for. His work just has a general eroticism that runs through it, represented in both the men and the women, and I don't mean that in the disingenuous "Oh, well the big angry barbarian ALSO doesn't have a shirt on" way, I mean look at this Tarzan:  That's a sexy goddamned Tarzan. I'd even go so far as to call that a Tarzan that fucks! A lot of later artists influenced by Frazetta only ended up focusing on the "sexy naked ladies" part of his oeuvre, creating work that one-sidedly only sexualized women, but Frank's own work was of a world where everyone was naked and sexy.
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Aug 6, 2021 15:30
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bewilderment posted:Fate Accelerated actually has a very solid niche which is neither of those - it's for games where if you tried to use the default skill system for it, everyone would either have nearly identical skills setup, or else where the range of possible skills is so wide that nobody would meaningfully engage with it. quote:The idea that it's 'not enough to hang a campaign off of' is ridiculous because people manage to have whole long campaigns that are totally freeform.
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Aug 6, 2021 15:42
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Nehru the Damaja posted:For what it's worth, what's worth playing in urban fantasy out there? I keep wanting to play something in the genre and the closest I got was two sessions of Changeling before covid killed everything. I have some Vampire 5e books but it seems like a lot to learn before I even try to sell people on it. I would be careful about anything World of Darkness ; they're so variable that it's impossible to give blanket recommendations. Like, they range between my beloved Mage : The Awakening, a game that was basically designed to enrapture me, to Beast... the abuse apology simulator with god drat awful themes of "representation". There's some great stuff, but you should really ask/skim the WoD thread so they can set you up and steer you away from the games that suck but have very similar titles to the good games. Dresden Files is, as stated, uh... fine, I guess? It's not gross or mechanically broken, but it's not exactly exciting either. It was cool back in like 2009 when it was still cutting edge, but the industry's gotten a lot better since then. Unknown Armies, as mentioned, is really great but very specific in what it's trying to emulate genre-wise. This is a "problem" that a lot of better games have because they traded being generic for being really good at what they want to do. Don't Rest Your Head, Monsterhearts, etc. are going to live in this category as well. Basically, if you like the pitch, you'll be a very happy person, but they've spent a lot of effort having mechanics that reinforce the themes they want to show off, so if you're not going for that no poo poo it's gonna fall flat. Don't try to dig a hole with a screwdriver and then get angry at screwdrivers.
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Aug 6, 2021 16:25
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No one's suggested either Urban Shadows or Dresden Files Accelerated? (The Fate Core rather than Spirit of the Century era Dresden Files Fate game).
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Aug 6, 2021 19:17
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KingKalamari posted:While browsing through Frazetta's catalog of work for ideas I actually started to appreciate how he was a lot more, for lack of a better word, "progressive" he was than a lot of his later imitators. While his work is filled with naked ladies, he was also a lot more even-handed in who he sexualized than people give him credit for. His work just has a general eroticism that runs through it, represented in both the men and the women, and I don't mean that in the disingenuous "Oh, well the big angry barbarian ALSO doesn't have a shirt on" way, I mean look at this Tarzan: I'm a Frazetta fan. Not only because I grew up reading Conan and Tarzan stuff, but my stepdad - who introduced me to comics - was a Frazetta fan too. He had prints on the walls of a half-dozen Frazetta works when I was growing up so I looked at them all the drat time. Frazetta was a real, old-school illustrator, and he cared about everything he depicted, not just the women, although he was frequently called upon to create illustrations for male-power-fantasy type works. So there's quite a lot of that. But his women were only draped across the feet of a dominating man when that was what he was told to do: he just as (or maybe more) often painted them as dynamic and powerful people, even while they were also being near-naked erotic figures. Examples: (first three spoilered for borderline :NSFW:)     These women have agency and power, they're not subservient toys for men.
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Aug 6, 2021 23:22
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Those middle two should be story progression.
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Aug 7, 2021 00:47
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Coolness Averted posted:That's pretty dang wholesome Yeah what the heck, was not expecting that at all Xiahou Dun posted:I would be careful about anything World of Darkness ; they're so variable that it's impossible to give blanket recommendations. I mean it's fairly easy to say that Beast is unsalvageably awful and should not exist, Mummy is a boring mess (I seriously wish it were good because I'm on an ancient Egypt kick and fantasy always does it so bad), and the rest can generally make a pretty good game. The real nightmare is that WOD has perhaps the worst disaster of "which edition is the good one." If any particular supernatural type speaks to you especially well (emotionally unstable badasses with great responsibility? got burn notice'd by god himself? inhuman but want to be human?) then I'd say ask the World of Darkness Megathread for suggestions on which edition is the best, it'll give us a break from making fun of weird canon NPCs. bewilderment posted:The actual FitD issue is that maxing out your resistances is probably the most powerful thing you can do and can make you immune to most consequences while letting you mostly succeed on retries. Yeah that seems to be very table-variable. I went really hard on resistances and it was just a purely worse decision than pumping my character's favored strategy out the gate and then going deep on a backup plan. And of course it's not intrinsic to FITD to do resistances like that - Wicked Ones just has you resist with a specific skill instead of doing the orthogonal pool.
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Aug 7, 2021 01:00
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Total conjecture here, but I feel like if you pitch "urban fantasy" to most players they want to play a motley crew of different magical weirdos. All of the WoD games, old and new, really lose a lot when you start mixing the games together. I mean, you can certainly find places where the themes of e.g. Mage and Vampire intersect and make a great game of it, but you'll need a lot of buy-in from the players, to about the same degree you need for Unknown Armies. As opposed to, say, Urban Shadows or Dresden Files.
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Aug 7, 2021 01:12
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Halloween Jack posted:Total conjecture here, but I feel like if you pitch "urban fantasy" to most players they want to play a motley crew of different magical weirdos. All of the WoD games, old and new, really lose a lot when you start mixing the games together. I mean, you can certainly find places where the themes of e.g. Mage and Vampire intersect and make a great game of it, but you'll need a lot of buy-in from the players, to about the same degree you need for Unknown Armies. I guess the thing that worries me about Urban Shadows is I was told it's kind of exclusively a political factions game, and that might not be everyone's cup of tea, where it seems like with Vampire you could push the camera in or pull it out depending on the scope of the story you want to tell. That's the impression of somebody who has played neither, though.
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Aug 7, 2021 01:46
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Tulip posted:
Exactly. If it was just which game-line to pick the easy answer is a brief, brief summary of the themes of, say, Vampire vs. Promethean. The really difficult to describe part is which version of a given game line to play, made even worse by one of the most confusing naming conventions possible. I've been following White Wolf/Onyx Path since the 90's and I still need to take a second to sort out oWoD vs. nWoD vs. cWoD etc. And I could do a happy man if I never had to touch the old school WoD math ever again. Nehru the Damaja posted:I guess the thing that worries me about Urban Shadows is I was told it's kind of exclusively a political factions game, and that might not be everyone's cup of tea, where it seems like with Vampire you could push the camera in or pull it out depending on the scope of the story you want to tell. That's the impression of somebody who has played neither, though. Yeah, I think you want Demon : The Descent. The politics slider is turned way the hell down compared to like Vampire or whatever, the group can be pretty varied because the umbrella of "demon" is quite large and it's basically Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but you're a giant praying-mantis made of starlight and mirrors wearing a human suit. Demon loving owns bones.
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Aug 7, 2021 02:30
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Unfortunately, Frazetta popularised the depiction of Conan as a mostly-naked, oiled muscle-man, which is not at all in line with how Conan is actually depicted in the Howard stories.
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Aug 7, 2021 02:32
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Warthur posted:That's interesting, and certainly sounds useful, but on the other hand it feels like it should just be "optional rules in FATE Core for people who want to run such a game", rather than "a whole distinct fork of the system in its own right". Warthur posted:And if your group is happy to do that then they don't need to use any system at all. Unless an RPG has an inbuilt endpoint, like Ten Candles or Polaris or some PbtA depending on how you count it, how heavy a system is has little to do with how many sessions it supports.
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Aug 7, 2021 03:50
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bewilderment posted:Unless an RPG has an inbuilt endpoint, like Ten Candles or Polaris or some PbtA depending on how you count it, how heavy a system is has little to do with how many sessions it supports. On the one hand that's technically true. On the other hand, "heavier" games tend to offer more robust systems of progression, which is pretty important for a lot of folks in sustaining their interest over a long (12+ session) game. You can theoretically do infinite sessions of a game where the entirety of the mechanics are "roll 2d6 PbtA style, adjudicate results freeform," but for me and the people I tend to game with, we'd get more satisfaction out of a system where meaningful mechanical changes take place over the course of that long campaign. I've done long FATE games before, and while shifting aspects provides that sense for a while, for our group, it got stale eventually.
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Aug 7, 2021 04:33
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Lemon-Lime posted:Unfortunately, Frazetta popularised the depiction of Conan as a mostly-naked, oiled muscle-man, which is not at all in line with how Conan is actually depicted in the Howard stories. Nah, that was mostly Boris Vallejo. Dude LOVES painting oiled up muscles. Frazetta's Conan, while still mostly naked, tended to be drier and rougher around the edges... (Spoilered for mostly-naked Conans)  Frazetta's Conan: Buff and shirtless, but quite dry  Vallejo's Conan: 78% oiled muscles by volume
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Aug 7, 2021 04:39
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Xiahou Dun posted:Demon loving owns bones. 
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Aug 8, 2021 20:03
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Demon absolutely begs to be implemented in a better system than Storyteller and distanced from Matt McFarland. I like the idea of hacking Jenna Moran's Glitch to run Demon, as there's a lot of crossover resonance there -- you play characters hiding from the forces that own reality, there are four major mechanical "splats", using your powers accumulates danger points that eventually translates into permanent reality glitches attached to your character, your "endgame" is character retirement somewhere quiet and away from the hostile forces hunting you, and you can turn yourself into a kaiju if you want but it rarely actually helps you solve your problems.
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Aug 8, 2021 21:09
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I'd argue that comparing the system to McFarland is more than a bit much : I have my issues with the math, sure, but let's not get histrionic here.
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Aug 8, 2021 22:03
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TC is saying that McFarland was the developer for Demon, which leaves a bad taste in many's mouths.
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Aug 8, 2021 22:40
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Yes, I know. And I was saying that "the system is kind of general so it doesn't emulate the genre as well" isn't comparable to being a horrific sex criminal.
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Aug 8, 2021 22:46
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yes, I know. And I was saying that "the system is kind of general so it doesn't emulate the genre as well" isn't comparable to being a horrific sex criminal.
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Aug 8, 2021 23:01
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Yawgmoth posted:Which is a complete non sequitur because no one said it was, or even came close to such an implication. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Demon absolutely begs to be implemented in a better system than Storyteller and distanced from Matt McFarland.
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Aug 8, 2021 23:17
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I started on making a PBTA Promethean and went "ok, so we need to track at minimum progress along the basic refinements, Aurum Stannus Ferrum Cuprum and Plumbum" and realized that fit neatly into Hot Hard Cool Sharp Weird and felt so dumb about it I stopped.
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Aug 8, 2021 23:21
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Uh. I Think you misread that. They're not comparing the game to the dude, they're saying he's gross and has his fingerprints on it. Like in the same way if I said "I want to bring the feeling of Dungeon World into a new system/better implementation of PbtA, and I want to distance myself from [dude who made DW and did gross stuff on his AP stream]" I'm not saying his grossness is there in Dungeon World. Just I want to get away from the system flaws and that dude's work. Though also, iirc McDonald's gross stuff did get published in nwod/chronicles of darkness supplements.
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Aug 8, 2021 23:47
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i probably should have tossed a comma in there to denote that it's two separate thoughts that don't directly relate to each other, but i also would have thought that was clear enough from context
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Aug 8, 2021 23:59
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Yes, those are both posts in the thread. Now explain to the class how "I would like this game to be in a better system and also not have a sex criminal in the credits" is a comparison. For reference:the dictionary posted:com·par·i·son
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Aug 9, 2021 00:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i probably should have tossed a comma in there to denote that it's two separate thoughts that don't directly relate to each other, but i also would have thought that was clear enough from context Yeah I was just giving you some poo poo because one of the things in that sentence is slightly worse than the other, and we shouldn't forget that. In conclusion, gently caress that rear end in a top hat. Yawgmoth posted:Yes, those are both posts in the thread. Now explain to the class how "I would like this game to be in a better system and also not have a sex criminal in the credits" is a comparison. For reference: You're being a dense prick for no reason. Also, citing "the dictionary"? Really? What are you, a lovely college essay? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 9, 2021 00:25
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