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The subtext of how the Inquisition is described is that it is a conveyer belt of people being recruited, starting out as Puritans, gradually becoming more and more radical as the combination of total freedom and radical challenges pushes them to adopt novel solutions, and eventually becoming corrupted because knowledge of Chaos is inherently corrupting and getting hunted down and executed by a fresh Puritan.
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Dec 4, 2022 12:12
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Alchenar posted:The subtext of how the Inquisition is described is that it is a conveyer belt of people being recruited, starting out as Puritans, gradually becoming more and more radical as the combination of total freedom and radical challenges pushes them to adopt novel solutions, and eventually becoming corrupted because knowledge of Chaos is inherently corrupting and getting hunted down and executed by a fresh Puritan.
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Dec 4, 2022 12:31
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As an Inquisitor, your #1 biggest threat is other Inquisitors.
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Dec 4, 2022 12:49
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The Lone Badger posted:As an Inquisitor, your #1 biggest threat is other Inquisitors. No, those guys are the second biggest threat. The biggest is yourself! Only half-joking here. The worst they can do is take your life. Only you can risk your soul.
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Dec 4, 2022 12:50
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Alchenar posted:The subtext of how the Inquisition is described is that it is a conveyer belt of people being recruited, starting out as Puritans, gradually becoming more and more radical as the combination of total freedom and radical challenges pushes them to adopt novel solutions, and eventually becoming corrupted because knowledge of Chaos is inherently corrupting and getting hunted down and executed by a fresh Puritan. The Eisenhorn books are about (most of) this exact cycle and keeping the POV entirely first-person does a good job of showing how he justifies each of his steps on the road to hell.
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Dec 4, 2022 14:32
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Let's face it - everyone in 40k is already in hell, some just learn to adjust to it.
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Dec 4, 2022 18:38
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Lord Koth posted:It does bear remembering that high ranking Inquisitors have authority and privileges far in excess of any Rogue Trader, despite the Rogue Trader themselves already having enormous power and privileges. Like, it doesn't matter how powerful they are, if a Rogue Trader gets caught with a Daemonhost they're just flat up dead as soon as a force to crush them can be mustered. On the other hand, Inquisitors can get away with it, though they sure as hell better be some combination of extremely powerful, high ranking, and/or have very good connections if they don't want unofficial sanctioning coming their way as it is extremely frowned upon, even for them. A big part of this is the size of the force currently under the Inqisitor's control. The guy with a small retinue of some Karskins and maybe a Culexus or two isn't going to be in the same threat rating as the guy ordering around an Imperial battlefleet who can likely very easily "request" a Space Marine chapter to assist.
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Dec 4, 2022 19:10
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Here's the character options for the RT ttrpg So the main issues is "career" for the Rogue Trader excludes the abilities from the other ones, it's like making the PC a default "fighter" but just a lot of customization options for types of fighter.   
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Dec 4, 2022 19:31
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pentyne posted:Here's the character options for the RT ttrpg If my eyes are glazing over looking at this stuff I can only imagine what's going on at Owlcat HQ right now
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Dec 4, 2022 20:05
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Janissary Hop posted:If my eyes are glazing over looking at this stuff I can only imagine what's going on at Owlcat HQ right now Probably a lot of laughing and high-fiving since, based on the last two games they made, they have hard evidence that they don't need to pay playtesters and can just release the game unfinished and let the suckers who buy it at launch do the QA work for them, and then once the game is actually finished, just rebrand it as an "Enhanced Edition" and get another couple weeks on the front page of Steam/GOG.  Oh, also they have little to no meaningful competition in the space (they're the only ones licensing these specific TTRPG properties), so they know that no matter what they do, people will buy their games anyway just to play Pathfinder or Rogue Trader in video game form. EclecticTastes fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Dec 4, 2022 |
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Dec 4, 2022 20:22
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It's such a GM focus-driven game with a huge emphasis on social skill engagement with characters that to make it an rpg with lots of combat they have to massively redesign the core concept. This is definitely a case where "less is more" and if they get into the usual bloat I think it will be a huge mess. Seems to me obvious ones are - stick to the 8 core careers, no insane number of archetypes for 40+ class options for NPCs - Compress the origin paths down to 2-3 choices to replace archetypes, add some psyker/Inquistion options for the PC. - Make a pool of universal skills/talents that everyone can use - Stick to some core career skills, like Xenos Lore and maybe social skills focus more on the diplomatic facing paths, advanced combat skills for the melee/ranged - Take any Ork Freeboota's straight from the enemy manual and just give them a handful of racial abilities but otherwise same skills as combat heavy roles The talents/skills offer a lot of flexibility based on the rulebook. You could make a 2h melee RT but when I looked at the build options of Arch-Militant they seem to get a lot more combat specific 'feats' that would make them a superior choice by far when min-maxing. I think if they build up all the other careers well, and then give the RT PC access to literally everything for build options depending on origin, then you've got a good starting base.
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Dec 4, 2022 20:26
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Azran posted:Owlcat's games are already buggy enough at release, can you imagine an alpha lol Yeah, while I desperately want a new RPG to play most RPGs in alpha are not worth it, an Owlcat game doubly so. Kingmaker was so buggy at launch I eventually had to give up playing it.
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Dec 4, 2022 20:41
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evilmiera posted:Yeah, while I desperately want a new RPG to play most RPGs in alpha are not worth it, an Owlcat game doubly so. Kingmaker was so buggy at launch I eventually had to give up playing it. They've improved in that, while you physically could not finish Kingmaker at release without a hex editor, you can now at least finish the game if you're willing to tolerate constant, inexplicable bugs. I was in the WOTR beta and, in between patches, they would break things that were previously working like "being able to talk to npcs" and "the power attack feat". What are they doing to break those things??? 
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Dec 4, 2022 21:13
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Janissary Hop posted:They've improved in that, while you physically could not finish Kingmaker at release without a hex editor, you can now at least finish the game if you're willing to tolerate constant, inexplicable bugs. They did that in the 1.0 WOTR release too, like the 2nd or 3rd major patch broke a critical path in Act 4 making the game impossible at that point.
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Dec 4, 2022 21:21
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I played WOTR at launch. Every single NPC had a horse or a bear, inexplicably. I think there was a bug where it was generating characters with more feats than they were supposed to have, so they defaulted to Animal Companion.
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Dec 4, 2022 21:59
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1stGear posted:The Eisenhorn books are about (most of) this exact cycle and keeping the POV entirely first-person does a good job of showing how he justifies each of his steps on the road to hell. Of course, Eisenhorn also had a major counterpoint with Commodus Voke, who stayed incredibly puritan to the end, and that was after a very long life (and a very impressive death). The cycle is something that people like Eisenhorn want to emphasize, because it clears them of all guilt. It wasn't a chain of bad decisions, or a fault in their character that lead to falling. It was just how things go, an inevitability. And admitting that there's even a possibility of avoiding it undermines the whole defense.
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Dec 4, 2022 23:39
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edit: wrong thread
Neo_Crimson fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Dec 5, 2022 |
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Dec 5, 2022 00:17
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The point of Eisenhorn is that to err is human. To never err is to pretty much become an authoritarian, inhuman fascist of the most extreme kind, chained to an unyielding, uncaring code that allows no deviance.
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Dec 5, 2022 00:26
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chiasaur11 posted:Of course, Eisenhorn also had a major counterpoint with Commodus Voke, who stayed incredibly puritan to the end, and that was after a very long life (and a very impressive death). And the counterargument would be that Voke's puritanism caused him to miss leads that unfurled greater conspiracies. And the counterargument to that would be that pursuing those leads led down the path of radicalism. And the counterargument to that would be that not pursuing them would have led to greater evils. And the counterargument to that would be that a radical Inquisitor is a greater evil. And the counterargument to Round and round it goes, where it stops whoops an entire hiveworld died.
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Dec 5, 2022 00:31
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1stGear posted:And the counterargument would be that Voke's puritanism caused him to miss leads that unfurled greater conspiracies. And the counterargument to that would be that pursuing those leads led down the path of radicalism. And the counterargument to that would be that not pursuing them would have led to greater evils. And the counterargument to that would be that a radical Inquisitor is a greater evil. And the counterargument to Oh, there are perfectly good reasons to not want to be Voke, even if you're enough of a bastard to be an Inquisitor in the first place. The issue is that he disproves the thesis. He proves you don't have to fall, even if the price is higher than you'd ever want to pay, and therefore removes the defense for falling. There's no grand inevitability to your failures, no wider narrative to cushion the tragic end results. In the end, it's just you, and your sins. Everything else is a distraction. Moving a little further from the Inquisition, that was a big theme in Traitor General. Gaunt and crew were on a Chaos controlled planet, and its influence wasn't turning into a gribbly monster. It was drawing out everyone's worst instincts and making it easier to act on them. But they still had to act, and realizing that was how Rawne managed to save his soul. Chaos is infectious, monstrous, all but inevitable... but it was still a choice, which meant it was something that could be resisted.
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Dec 5, 2022 01:22
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I feel like even radical inquisitors arent too keen on people directly outside their retinue who have authority from a completely different source getting into the xenos or daemon stuff too much. Like the whole reason you have a alien inquisitor henchman on your ship is to narc on you. Real "alien stuff for me but not thee" vibes.
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Dec 5, 2022 01:34
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The Inquisition ideology was that literally one soul exposed to chaos was enough to glass an entire planet over. But the lore prior to the Great Rift varied so wildly it was a mix of "ranking officers know about it" to "mind wipe Space Marines" for Chaos encounters. There's a ttrpg mechanic, and boy does it look complicated as hell, that tracks - fear using a 'shock table' - Insanity points - Corruption points And the in game mechanic states that if you exceed 99 corruption you are removed from play. It doesn't allow for a party to embrace chaos based on rules as written.
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Dec 5, 2022 01:38
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pentyne posted:The Inquisition ideology was that literally one soul exposed to chaos was enough to glass an entire planet over. It varies even more than that. In the Sabbat Worlds crusade, at least one trooper considered it something unusual and a mark of pride that he managed to avoid knowing the names of the four Chaos gods. It's like how you can't purge Cadia. If a region has frequent conflict with Chaos, then you can't replace your entire army every five minutes. Better to rely on the good old Armor of Contempt and save the executions for the extreme cases.
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Dec 5, 2022 02:20
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Janissary Hop posted:If my eyes are glazing over looking at this stuff I can only imagine what's going on at Owlcat HQ right now They've been converting Pathfinder across, a game a thousand times more complex with far more moving parts. The big thing that will kinda break how they make games is that Rogue Trader is game system where you are trying to avoid fighting. Your characters are super fragile and due to the wealth mechanic (you dont have money in the system per say you have 'profit factor' which is more about your large scale purchasing power) you're using the rocket tag super weapons pretty early. You dont really increase your defensive power much (power armour will do a good job of negating small arms power but other than that and end game shields theres no good jumps) and your characters dont really gain more health outside of buying a specific +1 to health that shows up on. It doesn't naturally have mechanic for dnd style encounter chains and a lot of the abilities and skill you buy are about investigation, diplomacy etc to avoid a firefight at all.
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Dec 5, 2022 03:44
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Yeah, I would wager they're going to be primarily using the game system as a baseline and heavily modifying it and making new mechanics and systems up whole cloth, because if you tried to make a fight-based dungeon crawler like Kingmaker and WotR were in the Rogue Trader system it would go incredibly poorly and be enormously frustrating.
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Dec 5, 2022 05:10
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No idea what Owlcat will choose to do but It's definitely possible to make CRPGs without a combat focus and to do pretty well. I think something like Shadowrun's approach could be a good balance for Rogue Trader. There is still a fair amount of combat and dungeon diving (a corporate building is basically a dungeon right?) but you also have a pretty extensive list of non-combat options for getting through a lot of the game. Even in the late game you can skip so many battles with the right skill set and it feels very good to do so since you still get karma (xp) for solving situations non-violently. They also let a lot of combat skills double as explorational or diplomatic tools so even combat heavy teams have options. For instance a rigger might send a battle bot into a vent to get access to a locked room or a street samurai might use their physical prowess to intimidate someone who would otherwise ignore a charismatic appeal, etc. So it's very possible to build engaging gameplay in a more or less traditional style of CRPG without always needing to resort to combat. Owlcat just needs to be creative about it and plan around that kind of thing. JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Dec 5, 2022 |
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Dec 5, 2022 06:29
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You're absolutely right, but given that Owlcat's two RPG offerings so far have had an enormous and overwhelming focus on extremely crunchy combat systems(WotR went so far as to have an entirely separate game mode that was also based entirely around combat to play alongside the main game mode that was entirely based around combat), I'm somewhat skeptical they'll suddenly swerve into making something like Planescape Torment.
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Dec 5, 2022 06:33
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Kanos posted:You're absolutely right, but given that Owlcat's two RPG offerings so far have had an enormous and overwhelming focus on extremely crunchy combat systems(WotR went so far as to have an entirely separate game mode that was also based entirely around combat to play alongside the main game mode that was entirely based around combat), I'm somewhat skeptical they'll suddenly swerve into making something like Planescape Torment. I think it's pretty safe to say you are correct and this is going to be a combat focused game. If they were enacting a fundamental design change philosophy with an emphasis on non-combat playthroughs being possible and as fulfilling as the standard fare, they would absolutely have advertised that as a major feature by now.
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Dec 5, 2022 06:51
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kingcom posted:They've been converting Pathfinder across, a game a thousand times more complex with far more moving parts. players having powerful weapons early doesn’t matter though, since that has nothing to do with what other people are shooting at you, something that is entirely within their control as a matter of campaign/encounter design (though admittedly that probably would represent a shift in Owlcat's approach) beyond that there are also a *lot* of avenues for increasing survivability fairly easily via a combination of cover modifiers, how they handle auto fire, changing the accessibility and cost of various defensive options (i.e. easy cybernetics or not, tweaking how dodge reactions work, etc.), adjusting how fate points are earned and used (per encounter or as ablative wounds?), adjusting (or ignoring) the light/heavy wound recovery rules, etc. this also isn’t D&D in terms of sacred cows, while “40k RPG” rules have some commonalities and people have their favorite iterations they were heavily tweaked with each iteration and afaik there aren’t any grogs who are going to jump down their throats if this game makes some substantial adjustments to benefit more action-oriented gameplay note that quite a lot of this could be easily hidden in the background of a CRPG - i.e. streamline away manual control of reactions so everyone always gets a dodge/parry roll, automatically grant +1 wound per every certain amount of xp earned, and make injections of mechanicus nanite healing goo (or what have you) reasonably plentiful and suddenly everyone is substantially more survivable in combat while things still feel/look superficially similar to tabletop (and probably flow better on a computer at least in the case of not needing to manually handle reactions) LGD fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Dec 5, 2022 |
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Dec 5, 2022 07:22
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I mean Rogue Trader RPG lacks Item/level treadmill that Dnd/pathfinder have. Starting characters are very competent at the beginning and don't end that much more powerful at the end of long campaign. There's no endless iteration of magic items with modifiers to feed players. You start with great equipment and maybe get upgrade or two during a long campaign per character.
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Dec 5, 2022 08:06
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LGD posted:players having powerful weapons early doesn’t matter though, since that has nothing to do with what other people are shooting at you, something that is entirely within their control as a matter of campaign/encounter design (though admittedly that probably would represent a shift in Owlcat's approach) A lasgun, the most basic starting low tier weapon in the system, does 1d10+3 with Semi-Auto. The basic stuff is pretty threatening to anyone not weaking guard flak armour or carapace. The intent of the FFG system is to make combat be a game of stacking your opening modifiers so it all resolves very quickly with some rocket tags. I'm not saying and never said they won't have to change stuff. They've already said they're going to. What I was suggesting is that the system they are adapting is very much in contrast to what they've historically done, focusing on a combat and loot driven rpg. Something in contrast to Rogue Trader. Issaries posted:There's no endless iteration of magic items with modifiers to feed players. You start with great equipment and maybe get upgrade or two during a long campaign per character. Also a big part of the 'loot treadmill' is more about working out if you can get 1,000 or 10,000 lasguns to arm a noble house thats going to give you complete mining rights if you help them lead a coup on some backwater planet.
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Dec 5, 2022 11:03
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kingcom posted:Also a big part of the 'loot treadmill' is more about working out if you can get 1,000 or 10,000 lasguns to arm a noble house thats going to give you complete mining rights if you help them lead a coup on some backwater planet. We got a new mining planet on our spreadsheet and Profit factor rose by +2.  vs. You got a Long Sword of Flaming +2 
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Dec 5, 2022 11:09
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It's likely that there'll be various tiers of weapons unlocked over time or found out in the world, anyway. Not as much as Pathfinder, of course, but probably comparable to HBS' Shadowrun games. Like, you'll start with access to Poor or maybe Standard quality gear, and work your way up to Best (or whatever terms RT uses, I don't recall offhand). In fact, if they're smart, Owlcat will keep the scope of this Rogue Trader game similar to the Shadowrun games, maybe a bit larger. Rogue Trader isn't really built for the kinds of years-long epic campaigns that Kingmaker and Wrath are simulating.
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Dec 5, 2022 11:43
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If I were Owlcat I'd make one of the recurring antagonists an Ork Freebooter who's basically like an ork version of yourself and he shows up and gets you into dumb shenanigans
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Dec 5, 2022 23:53
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EclecticTastes posted:It's likely that there'll be various tiers of weapons unlocked over time or found out in the world, anyway. Not as much as Pathfinder, of course, but probably comparable to HBS' Shadowrun games. Like, you'll start with access to Poor or maybe Standard quality gear, and work your way up to Best (or whatever terms RT uses, I don't recall offhand). In fact, if they're smart, Owlcat will keep the scope of this Rogue Trader game similar to the Shadowrun games, maybe a bit larger. Rogue Trader isn't really built for the kinds of years-long epic campaigns that Kingmaker and Wrath are simulating. That would be 1/10, would not Rogue trade game. Rogue Traders are immensely wealthy. You are 0.000000000000000001% of the humanity and your wealth is incalculable, except in abstract sense of profit factor. You own literal planets and your flagship is more valuable than most of them. Your ship has a crew in tens to hundreds thousands of people that have lived there generations as your family serfs.
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Dec 6, 2022 05:55
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Issaries posted:That would be 1/10, would not Rogue trade game. Oh, sorry, to be more clear, when I say "scope", in this case I mean in terms of the game's length. Obviously you should have the giant ship and be colonizing/exploiting planets, but in terms of how many "missions" or however the game is eventually divided up, they cannot make a Rogue Trader campaign that's as long as Kingmaker and have it feel rewarding to play without completely reworking how equipment scales or how the player levels or any number of other things that are core to the RT system, and the Shadowrun games by HBS are of a more appropriate length. You know, like, fifty hours rather than two-hundred.
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Dec 6, 2022 07:08
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the gamedev company has probably put more design thought into it than some random avatars on the internet but yeah, potentially getting your top-tier weapon at chargen like in tabletop would be awful. so would starting with poor lasguns and ending with archaeotech multimeltas. hopefully they don't take the sidegrade approach of "hey, gave you a plasma gun that's great against orks!" or something. if i was doing it, i'd have a spread of +1-+5 weapons where the bonus gets scaled appropriately (e.g. a +5 lascannon gets more extra damage than a +5 autopistol) and maybe a new "anti-armour" tag where the big guns are only vaguely accurate against stuff like vehicles, dreadnoughts and non-marine power armour or something, giving a reason for multiple weapon sets and for carrying a plasma gun vs a plasma cannon. but i'm not doing it.
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Dec 6, 2022 11:07
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The obvious solution is to have increasing grades of archeotech or xenotech. Things where the money cost is not remotely a factor in finding/using them.
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Dec 6, 2022 12:49
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Buschmaki posted:If I were Owlcat I'd make one of the recurring antagonists an Ork Freebooter who's basically like an ork version of He shows up to steal your hat, you are obligated by your charter to GET THE HAT BACK
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Dec 6, 2022 16:23
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pentyne posted:The obvious solution is to have increasing grades of archeotech or xenotech. Things where the money cost is not remotely a factor in finding/using them. Huh... this does make a lot of sense, especially as RT already has rules for 'general' archaeotech and xenotech 
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Dec 6, 2022 16:35
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