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Der Waffle Mous posted:Let me tell you about the faction wherein you have game mechanics toy torture a baby elephant to buff your other monsters. Pom deserves to be made an example of, lest the monarchy return. My Father's Work Had an interesting bit of politics when I played it at a convention: letting the town die to plague killed most of the villagers, meaning they were unable to form an organized resistance.
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Dec 12, 2022 05:37
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Captain Oblivious posted:I used to like Lancer, but more and more I've come to the conclusion that it's a schizophrenic setting that doesn't really know what it wants. And that it was written by someone who very much wants to write a book, not a game, and it is accordingly Pretty Bad at accomodating the existence of PCs and giving them things to do. The game constantly writes about poo poo that is just totally loving irrelevant to the player. Lancer's in a weird place where a lot of the lore has been soft-retconned since the release of the core rulebook and not in ways that are good for mechanics. For the uninitiated, the way you level up in Lancer is that you take a rank in one of the four major mech manufacturers of the setting. In the core book, these manufacturers were painted with shades of grey. Running a campaign with players being a team of Harrison Legionnaires is a direct suggestion made in the book. In the current continuity, Harrison Armory are literally fascist holdouts, and taking a rank from them is like slapping a "This Machine Kills Fascists" bumper sticker on a Tiger tank you received from Nazi Germany for services rendered. However, because of the construction of the rules, you can't *actually* ban or soft-ban any of the manufacturers because they are inextricably linked to build directions. It's like in DND if the only way to rank up as Wizard was as a Red Wizard of Thay.
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Dec 12, 2022 12:46
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Lancer’s greatest mistake was being set during Third Comm rather than the revolt against SecComm. As is it’s a kinda post scarcity setting that also still can’t imagine an end to capitalism, nor does it overly encourage you to fight the regressive capitalists and to the extent that it does it’s in a very “but it won’t matter anyway” kinda way. It’s a setting that craves being recognized as leftist but also has little more conception of popular politics than Battletech and most things happen by way of the fiat of a Great Man or an oligarchy of Great Men. Lancer is bad at what it sets out to do.
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Dec 12, 2022 13:16
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Der Waffle Mous posted:Let me tell you about the faction wherein you have game mechanics toy torture a baby elephant to buff your other monsters. warmahordes lore is at its best when not only is everyone the bad guy but they're also various flavors of huge losers my faction is the psychically enslaved army of a sulky teenage dragon whose sole motivation is "no, gently caress YOU, dad!" e: the aforementioned baby elephant torturers have only recently overthrown a deposed nobleman who conned them into believing he was their messiah and are basically invading the warmachine side of the continent out of sheer embarrassment the circle of druids trying to stop the apocalypse are Wile E. Coyote-levels of self-sabotaging dumbasses who've alienated every potential ally they ever had Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 14:28
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Oh boy, so Warmachine. The setting itself has some great stuff IMO (dragons, even their mere presence, being intrinsically anathema to living matter is one of my favorite bits, personally) but Page 5 was not at all a great look even if that got ditchd either at the beginning or halfway through Mk II, the second edition of the rules. Menoth in particular is weird in that the whole 'religious zealots obsessed wih martyrdom who live in the desert' would bring to mind popular 2000s cultural depictions of Islam but their iconography and religious code has much more of an Old Testament vibe. Also the art direction for a lot of female characters during the first couple editions of the game was firmly 'high-heeled battle babe' and it was gross, but IMO still better than Warhammer having basically no women or whatever the gently caress Malifaux was doing back then (tbf their art department also got better over time). It also suffers from using fantasy races as an analogy for discrimination and bigotry. It's one of those settings where everyone sucks 100% of the time with the only ones who are remotely sympathetic being the Troll Kriels (Scottish trolls who got hosed over and over by the imperialistic national governments under which they reside) and even some elements of that faction do a few warcrimes here and there. I guess I have a soft spot for the setting since, again, there is a lot of cool poo poo... even if I do realize a lot of early stuff that used to suck did not get fixed or if it did, maybe not to the degree it should have. The Skorne having whole units dedicated to animal torture isn't as bad as them being strongly Persian in influence while also being presented as irredeemably evil and a major, existential threat for all the other (Western-styled) factions of the setting. Azran fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 14:36
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:While Battletech derives from a bunch of sources, like any fictional universe, it's sometimes useful to remember that in many ways it's not a game patterned on the future but the past - the Lyrans are Napoleonic Prussia,
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Dec 12, 2022 14:42
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Halloween Jack posted:So...they suck? There's a Faction in a wargame whose Thing is just being poo poo at war? Eh, to be fair I was playing an all-goblin Warhammer Fantasy army at the same time. Sometimes, being total poo poo is fun. More politically, Flames of War at that time was basically written full-Manstein. If you wanted to play soviets, you had to field a full battalion of 3 times as many men as the other nations. With equivalently high monetary cost in toys. All your stuff ranged from "reluctant conscript" to at the very best "confident trained." All the soviet lists were generic "a rifle unit." "a tank unit." etc. Meanwhile the germans had different unique lists for every loving SS division. You had to be uniquely, historically bad to get a rating less than "fearless veteran" on an SS german or a finn. Never mind that the soviets only outnumbered the germans in Barbarossa when you're only counting front-line germans, but count every rear end in a top hat on guard duty in Magadan for the soviets. Never mind that the SS regularly sent fanatic kids charging directly onto Red Army machine guns. Please forget that Battlefront was pumping out dice, carrying cases, etc with the death's head, sieg runes, swastikas, and all the poo poo on them. You want to be 1. SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler? We got your dice. Your SS are 5. Wiking? Don't worry, we have the merch for both the flemish and scandinavian regiments. Don't get me started on the guys who would roll up to the LGS with an SS army and the full regalia. Every bit of SS got unique special rules on top of the standard german supersoldier rules. RKKA special rules just crippled you. Enjoy having your tanks drive up in a big stupid box because they can't do anything without being an inch from each other! That was a time. I can't be convinced it wasn't a political choice.
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Dec 12, 2022 15:48
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Gotta remember that the popular depictions of the Eastern Front in the Western world are literally written by Nazis.
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Dec 12, 2022 16:00
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Eh, to be fair I was playing an all-goblin Warhammer Fantasy army at the same time. Sometimes, being total poo poo is fun. Wait, is this not still the case? I assumed Flames of War is still the Hollywood (read: Nazi-glorifying) WW2 wargame.
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Dec 12, 2022 16:05
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Halloween Jack posted:So...they suck? There's a Faction in a wargame whose Thing is just being poo poo at war? Well the Lyran's thing is that they have the industrial capacity to get away with it. So the joke about Steiner Scout Squads is a combination of "  they're using max tonnage mechs to do scouting" combined with " they've churning out enough mechs to do that regularly"
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Dec 12, 2022 18:39
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SirPhoebos posted:Well the Lyran's thing is that they have the industrial capacity to get away with it. So the joke about Steiner Scout Squads is a combination of " A friend once ran an rpg campaign using Battleforce rules for mech combat and we played as Free World's Leaguers. The characters ended up cursing the Lyran heavier tonnage and better facilities(They have beer coolers! And fridges! On the field! What sorcery is this?). Though his version of Lyra was more like a militant Hanseatic League and less Prussia.
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Dec 12, 2022 21:03
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Ataxerxes posted:Though his version of Lyra was more like a militant Hanseatic League and less Prussia. I’d agree with that. Prussian facial hair but hanseatic league business mindset. The Lyran Commonwealth is notably the only major house whose nobles regularly engage in capitalism. The rest of the houses have their nobles just doing the traditional landlordism and war. That also plays into why the lyran nobles are a little worse at doing war, but have more resources for better gear.
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Dec 12, 2022 21:18
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Der Waffle Mous posted:Let me tell you about the faction wherein you have game mechanics toy torture a baby elephant to buff your other monsters. I see where It Takes Two got inspiration for it's baby elephant scene
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Dec 12, 2022 21:33
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Captain Oblivious posted:Lancer’s greatest mistake was being set during Third Comm rather than the revolt against SecComm. Pretty much, yeah. And I like Third Comm. They're messy. They're hypocrites. They're too terrified.of making the same mistakes as the first Comm that they can't commit to their ideals. They engage in colonialist endeavors and operate a massive surveillance state to defend against... the people who put those institutions in place to begin with. They're a hot mess that is trying, and failing, to be better than they are. They feel like a real government in ways that other games don't and that's what makes it a really interesting setting. It just sucks to run a game in. Acute Grill fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 21:39
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All this talk about Warmachine's page 5 had me morbidly curious enough to take a look, and oof that's something special alright: My guys, you're still pushing painted miniatures around pretending they're beating each other up. You're not gonna magically turn it into some cool macho thing no matter how hard you try.
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Dec 12, 2022 21:47
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I checked and I can buy a pound of pewter suitable for miniature making as a regular consumer for $33 CAD today.
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Dec 12, 2022 21:49
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:Lancer's in a weird place where a lot of the lore has been soft-retconned since the release of the core rulebook and not in ways that are good for mechanics. For the uninitiated, the way you level up in Lancer is that you take a rank in one of the four major mech manufacturers of the setting. In the core book, these manufacturers were painted with shades of grey. Running a campaign with players being a team of Harrison Legionnaires is a direct suggestion made in the book. In the current continuity, Harrison Armory are literally fascist holdouts, and taking a rank from them is like slapping a "This Machine Kills Fascists" bumper sticker on a Tiger tank you received from Nazi Germany for services rendered. However, because of the construction of the rules, you can't *actually* ban or soft-ban any of the manufacturers because they are inextricably linked to build directions. It's like in DND if the only way to rank up as Wizard was as a Red Wizard of Thay. I... don't really see that? Harrison Armoury is a lovely lovely mega-corp and a remnant of a semi-crushed Reactionary movement, whose reach exceeds their grasp and who are, let's put it bluntly, only able to stay in business because the last attempt they had to build a good prediction A.I. almost got them annihilated. They aren't Nazi's in the same way that something with a Waffen-SS thing is. They are more in the way that something from America is built on the back of hideously exploitative labour practices and being an ideological horror show. When you have a setting filled with so many planets and systems of governance then it seems like a cool thing. Like you don't think starting as a starry eyed "this will be us helping!" stellar marine to realising "oh no we are in Starship troopers" is not a fun campaign idea? Captain Oblivious posted:Lancer’s greatest mistake was being set during Third Comm rather than the revolt against SecComm. What are you on about? There is a load of stuff to do in the game, it gives far more options of what the setting is than many others I've spent time with. What "great men" are there inside of Union. Name one. Just because you found Harrison Armoury interesting and then spread that out across a bunch of different settings doesn't mean everyone else does. Like I get that you may dislike the setting and the whole thing of it. It's fine to do so, but to prefer Battletech of all things? Acute Grill posted:It just sucks to run a game in. See, I'm not so sure on that. I've run a few quick things and the setting is just fun. I'm so loving done with settings like 40k at this point that just one where someone is trying is a relief.
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Dec 12, 2022 21:54
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Josef bugman posted:I... don't really see that? Harrison Armoury is a lovely lovely mega-corp and a remnant of a semi-crushed Reactionary movement, whose reach exceeds their grasp and who are, let's put it bluntly, only able to stay in business because the last attempt they had to build a good prediction A.I. almost got them annihilated. They aren't Nazi's in the same way that something with a Waffen-SS thing is. They are more in the way that something from America is built on the back of hideously exploitative labour practices and being an ideological horror show. When you have a setting filled with so many planets and systems of governance then it seems like a cool thing. Did you miss the part where SecComm literally genocided the only intelligent alien species humanity ever met?
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Dec 12, 2022 22:03
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Acute Grill posted:Did you miss the part where SecComm literally genocided the only intelligent alien species humanity ever met? Did you miss the comparison to the USA? Like, I get it SecComm we're reactionary dickheads and it's great that they were overthrown. However Harrison Armoury suits being used against slavers is not the same as saying you've been given a Kigg Tiger or whatever. The sheer scale of the universe and the fact that, with time lag and cultural drift, so many places will not even know much about it is fun from my perspective. You can, and should, still kill them ofc, but it introduces fun complications to a setting that is filled with them.
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Dec 12, 2022 22:12
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Harrison Armory isn't SecComm. You're not piloting a Tiger tank, you're piloting a heavily armed Ford automobile and/or IBM computer in the sci-fi equivalent of the year 1950. You're definitely still morally compromised (and frankly the default presentation for who/what a Lancer is is more "somewhere between a mercenary and a cop" than "hero of the revolution") but it's far more in the context of tacitly supporting economic repression and horrific labor relations than siding with the literal genocidaires, which is exactly what Josef said.
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Dec 12, 2022 22:13
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Lancer would benefit from a separation between the mech-lines themselves and the corpro-states so you can have your Harrison armory mech without feeling like you are tacitly endorsing fascism or a HORUS mech without your GM feeling obligated to make you jump through hoops because in-universe the blueprints are dark web bullshit. Like, maybe say the mech-lines were designed by the factions but they're so utterly wide-spread that you can grab knock-offs easily. As far as great man theory, I don't think Lancer as whole subscribes to it but the Trade Baronies (a neo-fuedal society) do and there's a decent amount of content from their perspective. The other great movers and shakers are literal paracausal gods and super-AIs
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Dec 12, 2022 22:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Harrison Armory isn't SecComm. You're not piloting a Tiger tank, you're piloting a heavily armed Ford automobile and/or IBM computer in the sci-fi equivalent of the year 1950. You're definitely still morally compromised, but it's far more in the context of tacitly supporting economic repression and horrific labor relations than siding with the literal genocidaires, which is exactly what Josef said. It's literally owned by the son of thr guy who ran SecComm and is staffed by the former fascist government officials. They're literally the people who did the genocide. Harrison even exclusively makes big military humanoid mechas. They're not being subtle about it. Acute Grill fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 22:16
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Acute Grill posted:Harrison even exclusively makes big military humanoid mechas. They're not being subtle about it. This is an extremely weird thing to lay at Harrison's feet in a game about giant punchy robots. Yes, they do. Everyone does. That's the game.
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Dec 12, 2022 22:23
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no such thing as ethical consumption under fully automated luxury gay space communism
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Dec 12, 2022 22:23
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Acute Grill posted:It's literally owned by the son of thr guy who ran SecComm and is staffed by the former fascist government officials. They're literally the people who did the genocide. I'm not like super into Lancer or anything so I don't have a horse in this fight, but you seem to be ignoring all nuance in the setting and then are complaining it lacks nuance. Like, you said a thing about the setting, other people corrected you and then you said "Well, X is kind of like Y so my argument still stands," without acknowledging that anything shifted.
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Dec 12, 2022 22:24
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:Lancer's in a weird place where a lot of the lore has been soft-retconned since the release of the core rulebook and not in ways that are good for mechanics. For the uninitiated, the way you level up in Lancer is that you take a rank in one of the four major mech manufacturers of the setting. In the core book, these manufacturers were painted with shades of grey. Running a campaign with players being a team of Harrison Legionnaires is a direct suggestion made in the book. In the current continuity, Harrison Armory are literally fascist holdouts, and taking a rank from them is like slapping a "This Machine Kills Fascists" bumper sticker on a Tiger tank you received from Nazi Germany for services rendered. However, because of the construction of the rules, you can't *actually* ban or soft-ban any of the manufacturers because they are inextricably linked to build directions. It's like in DND if the only way to rank up as Wizard was as a Red Wizard of Thay. Well about that... (Red Wizard of Thay was pretty drat common in 3E optimization boards because it made important numbers go up)
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Dec 12, 2022 22:27
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'm not like super into Lancer or anything so I don't have a horse in this fight, but you seem to be ignoring all nuance in the setting and then are complaining it lacks nuance. I never complained it lacked nuance. Hell, I was saying I liked the setting conceptually I just don't like running a game in it. My only argument has been that the faction staffed by fascist government officials loyal to the old fascist government not being fascist is a very stupid thing to believe. I'll drop it. It's pretty tangential to the thread subject anyway.
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Dec 12, 2022 22:28
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You don't actually have to chum up with Harrison to pilot their mechs. They're just print licenses you got from a store or a merchant or w/e. There are a lot of other mechs to get instead, playing a character that refuses Harrison equipment is perfectly viable. The real issue with Lancer is that you can buy licenses for NHP's, sapient people that you use for buffs in your mech, locked in caskets, and socialized to act human. They may have rights, but when you have no body and get regularly reset, the balance of power is skewed so far you might as well be an indentured servant. Of course, the friendly, helpful AI that's basically a slave is a pretty common trope in sci-fi, and the setting does touch on it.
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Dec 13, 2022 07:58
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SirPhoebos posted:Well the Lyran's thing is that they have the industrial capacity to get away with it. So the joke about Steiner Scout Squads is a combination of " Yeah, in universe and out of universe it's " they're using max tonnage mechs to do scouting" but at the same time it's also " oh loving no they're using max tonnage mechs to do scouting ops again" since their industrial capacity is way above anyone else's due to being slightly less moronic fashie shitheads compared to everyone else; and yet they also appoint (usually highly incompetent) officers by dint of noble birth instead of commoners and such through competency and merit. Unfortunately for everyone else, the perks of their comprehensive logistics network can overwhelm the complete and utter lack of strategy that is the downside of many of their commanders and higher ranked pilots that would handle assault mechs. Since asymmetric warfare is a thing in the future and whoops guess what having an endless supply of big rear end mechs in a setting about mechs fighting each other means that no one wants to end up on the wrong end of a Steiner scout lance even if the guys who are piloting it are probably more inbred than the Hapsburgs. So poo poo like the Atlas zerg rush occasionally happens to the poor bastards on the other side of (insert name of the latest meaningless war in an endless line of them here) who are expecting a light probing assault at worst from Steiner instead of six Atlas's just wasting a small fortune going godzilla on some small outlying base before reporting in that they successfully "scouted" out the enemy position (and reduced them to a molten crater). After all, a scouting squad of max tonnage assault mechs (and that's not counting super heavy skyscraper sized mechs that can mount starship cannons meant for battleships slaughtering each other) is still a scout squad of max tonnage assault mechs. Scouting means not alerting the enemy, and if you slaughter all of the enemies you encounter due to sheer dint of absurdly overwhelming firepower that still counts as a successful scouting operation, right? Basically, House Steiner is a land of hilarious contrasts. Edit: And if this doesn't sound absolutely hilarious to you: Imagine the eugenics loving Clans wanting their fashie honorbound duels (Literally, "1v1 me bro" in the middle of a warzone is how the Clans expect it to work, complete with a period of poo poo talking at the beginning if the cartoon was any indication.) and demanding a Steiner scout lance face off against a scout lance of their best in a duel to the death to determine control of a planet. Only the Clan shows up to the fight fielding mechs that only come up to the Steiner scout lance's kneecaps at best. And Steiner has historical proof of their sheer incompetence they can (likely enthusiastically and possibly blithely if a noble is commanding the garrison) reference to confirm that this is entirely fair and legal to the batchall according to the terms of the Clan's space bushido nonsense. And yes, if you were wondering this is part of why the Clans didn't just curb stomp the Inner Sphere with their superior technology. Early on the Clans would usually roll up to a planet and expect some honor bound space weeb nonsense only for the Inner Sphere nations (who could traumatize the cast of Game of Thrones with their backstabbing and sleazy political opportunism) to cackle and bust out the nukes or some such underhanded tactic to slaughter the increasingly enraged Clans. TL;DR: To get the thematic gist of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zK-PjmyKY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFzVEM8pMrk or if "I just scouted an elemental. It has ceased transmitting." doesn't suit your comedic fancy and you want something more memeish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHDpO4QZrzs Archonex fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Dec 13, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2022 08:08
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Random questions on Battletech Lore: Did Kurita have a IJN vs IJA internal war going on, or was that skipped due to the fact that no one had a navy left after the 2nd Succession war? How was the Federated Commonwealth civil war not just breaking apart in the middle and pretending they never married together? Hadn't they been together for only a few years with a very narrow part in the middle connecting them? What if any was the flaws in the Federated Commonwealth? I know they lost their capital at some point somehow - what flaw made that happen? Was it the after effect of the FedCom Civil War? Is the Canopian's flaw that they were a society lead by women, which was horrifying to 1980's males? They seem nice otherwise. Why did both the Lyrans AND the Free Worlds League let the Cincinnati Federation of Nothing But Pirates continue to exist for so long? I understand having a pirate kingdom on that location of the map to allow both the LC and FWL someone to fight makes sense for a wargame, but what was the in-universe explanation?
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Dec 13, 2022 09:20
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House Steiner feels like they'd fit a very good role in a video game setting of high-risk high-reward encounters where if you can punch about your weight and take advantage of their idiocy you can potentially salvage or capture some mechs well above your current pay grade.
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Dec 13, 2022 10:20
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Comstar posted:Why did both the Lyrans AND the Free Worlds League let the Cincinnati Federation of Nothing But Pirates continue to exist for so long? I understand having a pirate kingdom on that location of the map to allow both the LC and FWL someone to fight makes sense for a wargame, but what was the in-universe explanation? I can't speak for the canon (Some of the rimward states barely get any characterization.) but if this is the south-eastern eastern pirates towards the rim of known civilization then part of it is because they're basically organized pirate clans that are infested with absolutely crazy bastards nasty enough to make it a logistics hazard to crush the group outright assuming megamods for Battletech pulling mechs from the lore is any indication. They're basically the equivalent of Warhammer 40K's Orks with all the batshit insane stunts their mechs are built for. Consider for a moment that these are the guys who will look at an Urbanmech (Essentially a giant trash can with gun mounts.), nod sagely at the weak and pathetic sight of it, and then have their batshit insane mechtechs upgun it with so many AC20 rotaries that the thing will literally have like a 70% chance of shaking itself apart or exploding in a massive fireball just from firing the guns once. Sure, the pilot probably dies, but even an Atlas will get ripped to shreds by the equivalent of a giant mechanized trash can suicide bombing the enemy with all building pulverizing guns blazing at full auto. Or that whole thing with the Black Knight assault mech that was renamed into being a "Dread Pirate Lord" or some such nonsense. Some maniac decided to weld the top of a Raven to a Black Knight's shoulder (that they decided to call "Polly") after swapping out the melee weapon with a cutlass and welding a giant heavily armored metal pirate hat to the top of the head. Because how is the galaxy going to know you're a badass pirate lord without a gigantic mechanized monument to your gooniness? Sure, it gets like 2kmph tops and even another Black Knight can walk loops around it but it's got a Raven with full ECM and ECCM capabilities running nonstop making it next to impossible to hit as it sloooowly advances on a target, can't be easily headshot by a specialized mech due to the up-armoring the hat gives it while advancing, is a Black Knight which means nothing aside from ludicrous outgoing firepower is going to down it even without the extra mods, and has a gigantic fuckoff pirate sword welded to one hand that can lop off most mech's limbs in one go. No one in their right mind would want to fight that thing. The entire faction doctrine might as well be "Be as crazy as possible so that no one in their right mind will want to get rid of us for fear of taking too many heavy losses to remain solvent as a nation or group.". It's telling that the mods where their faction tech features often have comments from your own ship's technicians that range from "What these assholes have done to this piece of equipment offends me on a visceral level. This barely even works now and they've sprayed some edgelord "Pirates 4 Lyfe" graffiti in this advanced modular SLDF era cockpit after ripping it's guts out." to an utterly bewildered (and slightly terrified at the implications) "How the gently caress did these lunatics even get out of the mechbay without this mech going up in a nuclear fireball?" once you can find their tech and get your hands on it. Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Dec 13, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2022 12:47
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Perestroika posted:These warjacks radiate power!
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Dec 13, 2022 12:47
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Perestroika posted:All this talk about Warmachine's page 5 had me morbidly curious enough to take a look, and oof that's something special alright: Page 5 was a toxic bane on gaming for more than one reason. Not only did it encourage the toxic "win at any cost" mindset, it was also the thing pointed at whenever you brought up things like, say, the Warcasters (the leader in each army) were wildly unbalanced between each other. It was fine if your warcaster just gave a mild buff to your army while your opponent got one that effectively skipped your next turn AND make all your stuff easy to hit, because you should have just taken YOUR one warcaster with a broken ability. You don't like having your warcaster sniped off the board turn one because my warcaster had LoS to a small bit of their coat? Maybe you should have hid them better and won the die roll for going first. Warmachine had a LOT of balance issues out of the gate, and you won't believe how much people bitched that the game was ruined every time Privateer Press tried to actually fix some of the glaringly broken mechanics. When people say Warmahordes was balanced, I have to assume they either started playing in Mk 2 or at least post-balance updates. It was bad enough that when I played with friends, we had to soft--ban at least one caster or unit per side.
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Dec 13, 2022 13:39
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SirPhoebos posted:Well about that... To "well actually" your "well actually", there were so many busted prestige classes for casters that you could choose whatever you wanted basically. The only real requirement for a 3e arcane prestige class to be good is that is has "increase spellcasting" in every row. I think the actual best ones for TO were the ones that did dumb poo poo with metamagic, which was Incantatrix (sp?) and some other that I now forget the name of. Incantatrix is notable for giving you 4 extra feats, including at level 1, and getting you 2 free metamagic/day at 7 and reducing the cost of ALL metamagic by 1 at level 10. At a glance, the Red Wizard seems pretty suboptimal actually - at level 1 you are giving up a whole school of magic and you get a ... conditional +1 to YOUR saves against your specialty school? Plus you have to be specialized already to enter the class, so you have to be missing 3 schools unless you are divination focused, I don't see anything here that justifies that trade, so if people were using it that must have been prior to 3.5 and the slew of extra books that came out during the lifecycle. Even the "main" thing you get from the class is a bonus to caster level, which is nice but not that hard to get elsewhere You do have the circle casting thing at 5, but that's mostly just a meme for an extended shaggy dog story where the punchline is casting launch bolt at caster level 69. Edit: to make this slightly more interesting for non-3.5-knowers, there's definitely some major "yikes" stuff in a lot of 3e books. Some infamous ones are Book of Vile Darkness and Book of Exalted Deeds which have some really weird notions of morality, including a bunch of stuff like "good" spells that brainwash people and deciding that poison is inherently evil but "positoxins" that only work on Bad Guys are morally good. There's also the pervasive "this race is always evil and this race is always good" poo poo, though of course the "my race is evil/good but I'm the one good/evil one" trope has been applied to probably every species in some rulebook or setting novel so they specify "the 'always' really means 95% unless it is an extraplanar being made of elemental good or evil". I think the BYOSetting nature of D&D is partially to blame for a lot of these problems, but I'm also not sure if I've ever seen a morality system done well. It seems like the more practical way to do anything similar would be with faction loyalty or something, which I'd say seems to be the general trend in video games, but it's also inherently fiddly when you don't have a computer to do the tabulation and tracking for you BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Dec 13, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2022 15:19
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BougieBitch posted:To "well actually" your "well actually", there were so many busted prestige classes for casters that you could choose whatever you wanted basically. The only real requirement for a 3e arcane prestige class to be good is that is has "increase spellcasting" in every row. I think the actual best ones for TO were the ones that did dumb poo poo with metamagic, which was Incantatrix (sp?) and some other that I now forget the name of. Incantatrix is notable for giving you 4 extra feats, including at level 1, and getting you 2 free metamagic/day at 7 and reducing the cost of ALL metamagic by 1 at level 10. I think I'm remembering the 3.0 version, which actually made the save DCs on your spells higher.
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Dec 13, 2022 15:25
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SirPhoebos posted:I think I'm remembering the 3.0 version, which actually made the save DCs on your spells higher. Oh yeah, that's way better, I see that version was printed in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.
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Dec 13, 2022 15:34
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Mage of the Arcane Order, Incantatrix, and Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil were the three I remember as more or less default on every wizard.
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Dec 13, 2022 15:56
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I actually played a Mystic Theurge once. I know, I know...
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Dec 13, 2022 16:01
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Halloween Jack posted:I actually played a Mystic Theurge once. I know, I know... The Mystic Theurge was invented as an elaborate mockery of how unbalanced 3.X was and I can't believe anything else. Making the single worst possible caster, an absolute joke, and it's still better than a fighter. That's just mean.
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Dec 13, 2022 16:16
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