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Actually, any weapon proficiency gives you access to guns. Its no longer a proficiency thing but an access thing.
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Aug 1, 2023 18:15
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Yeah, Investigator already has martial proficiency, which covers most guns you'd require as long as you have access somehow.
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Aug 1, 2023 18:59
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and 'somehow' just means that your GM is cool with guns being in their game, really obviously everything is optional based on GM approval but uncommon/rare is really just there as a flag to GMs that 'hey this might have unforeseen consequences, you should actively consider if you're cool with this'
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Aug 2, 2023 00:52
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I'm reading over the Agents of Edgewatch AP because I wanted to run a campaign set in Absalom and I can't believe that (spoilers, if you care) the second chapter has your cop player characters busting a strike. Yikes, lmao. Like the players don't have to bust the strike and can even help the the striking workers have their demands met but they're really just sent in there as strike breakers. It also has some really gross anti-union propoganda: they're Kobolds, but only their leader speaks Common and the AP specifically calls out the rank and file kobolds as repeating the leader's demands in common but having no idea what it actually means. Just some real unfortunate implications. It's also way gorier that I would expect, with the final chapters in the first two books being about dealing with a H. H. Holmes style serial killer and then a murder cult. Like, nothing inherently wrong with it, but it's not something I would surprise my players with and it is intended as surprise the way the AP is written. I've only read two of the six books so far and I'm thinking I would be better off just writing my own campaign and maybe stealing some of the encounters. There's one at a zoo that seems neat.
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Aug 2, 2023 04:33
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Hmm, make a adventure about fighting fantasy Pinkerton's.
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Aug 2, 2023 17:47
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Agents of Edgewatch has a pretty cringe premise. I don't think "being a cop" holds much appeal to very many TTRPG community members
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Aug 2, 2023 18:26
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Just do alkenstar so you have a proper gently caress the police campaign
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Aug 2, 2023 18:38
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Syrinxx posted:Agents of Edgewatch has a pretty cringe premise. I don't think "being a cop" holds much appeal to very many TTRPG community members Being a cop holds a lot of appeal to a lot of people, that's why so many long-running and successful TV shows are cop shows (and they are also easy to write, to be fair). However the implementation is everything, and strike-breaking and poo poo like that is not something I personally would want to explore.
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Aug 2, 2023 18:58
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Syrinxx posted:Agents of Edgewatch has a pretty cringe premise. I don't think "being a cop" holds much appeal to very many TTRPG community members I think it holds appeal to a lot of TTRPG community members, they're just all members that I'd rather never interact with. Edgewatch also came out at a really unfortunate time (summer of 2020) and Paizo had to immediately put out a free supplement to help people strip the cop stuff out of it.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:02
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"Helping people and having official support for it" is an appealing fantasy to a lot of people. But also fictional violence is exciting so of course when you try to write that idea into a game you're just gonna be a cop and whoops people start thoughtlessly putting crap like strike-breaking in.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:16
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I'm sure there's lots of people tired of being a murderhobo who'd enjoy being a legally sanctioned murderresident.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:19
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Scrap Dragon posted:I'm reading over the Agents of Edgewatch AP because I wanted to run a campaign set in Absalom and I can't believe that (spoilers, if you care) the second chapter has your cop player characters busting a strike. Yikes, lmao. Like the players don't have to bust the strike and can even help the the striking workers have their demands met but they're really just sent in there as strike breakers. It also has some really gross anti-union propoganda: they're Kobolds, but only their leader speaks Common and the AP specifically calls out the rank and file kobolds as repeating the leader's demands in common but having no idea what it actually means. Just some real unfortunate implications. So, safe to assume that Agents of Edgewatch's writer, James L. Sutter, is a chud. Good to know.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:19
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Dick Burglar posted:So, safe to assume that Agents of Edgewatch's writer, James L. Sutter, is a chud. Good to know. No. Not safe to assume that. Agents of Edgewatch represents... a lot of mistakes, but it definitely does not come from a place of chudbrain for the most part.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:24
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Chevy Slyme posted:No. Not safe to assume that. Writing a police procedural does not make you a chud, but gross implicit (I'm being generous) racism and encouraging strike-breaking definitely does. You'd have to be Pretty loving Stupid to miss what you're doing. So, I guess he's either a chud or Pretty loving Stupid.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:28
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Kinda funny that less than a year after releasing a union busting AP, Paizo workers voted to unionize.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:30
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Enos Cabell posted:Kinda funny that less than a year after releasing a union busting AP, Paizo workers voted to unionize. They in fact, used the kobold workers striking in edgewatch as a union mascot. It's definitely just a police procedural that was very clearly written 5 years ago and not 3 years ago, and 'lol kobolds stupid' is, again, another one of those old tropey beats that just kind of went relatively unexamined by a lot of folks until pretty recently. Agents of Edgewatch isn't good, but I wouldn't read too much into it's authors intentions or politics from it either. It mostly comes across as stupid and naive rather than malicious.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:35
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Yeah it’s the same thing as realizing that the antagonists in extinction curse actually have the moral high ground in the dispute but you can’t really negotiate with them because of demons and stuff. Not necessarily written out of intentional propaganda but just a huge blind spot about what you’re ACTUALLY saying
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Aug 2, 2023 19:43
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It doesn't really matter if Sutter is a CHUD or not; Agents of Edgewatch is a mid-tier adventure path with a premise that was totally "wrong place, wrong time" 'd by a political moment and should be stripped for parts. Not that I think Pathfinder 2e is particularly good to run a cop adventure in anyway, since GUMSHOE exists.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:44
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Dick Burglar posted:So, safe to assume that Agents of Edgewatch's writer, James L. Sutter, is a chud. Good to know. I seem to recall Sutter apologizing for that part of the adventure and giving up his royalties, so it may just be a case of not thinking through the implications. Once you get past the first adventure, Agents of Edgewatch turns into more fictional than realistic cop stuff -- stopping an elaborately planned bank robbery, infiltrating a thieves' guild, guarding a witness from the evil conspiracy that wants to silence them, etc. Which is less objectionable than strikebreaking, but of course it's still copaganda. Even if you set all that aside, though, the end of Agents is terrible. After five adventures' worth of investigation, politics, and conspiracy-unraveling, the sixth adventure is a bunch of extradimensional dungeon crawls filled with planar monsters. The start of the adventure admits straight up you'll probably have to let the players massively retrain their characters and swap their gear out to handle the new enemies. It's as if The Godfather suddenly climaxed with a starship fight.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:45
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Selachian posted:It's as if The Godfather suddenly climaxed with a starship fight. Wait hold on this might actually be fun.
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Aug 2, 2023 20:29
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Reminds me of the first couple of Ultima games, where you started out (and spent most of the game) traipsing across Ye Olde Fantasy Countryside and ended up finding a laser pistol and going to space in a space shuttle and becoming a space ace before being able to access a time machine to go back in time to stop the Big Bad. Then Richard Garriott chickened out and got rid of the space stuff after like Ultima 3. Edited because holy poo poo the denouement of Ultima 1 is even more insane than I remembered. Dick Burglar fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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Aug 2, 2023 21:54
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Dick Burglar posted:Reminds me of the first couple of Ultima games, where you started out (and spent most of the game) traipsing across Ye Olde Fantasy Countryside and ended up finding a laser pistol and going to space in a starship. At the very least we got some Kilrathi from Wing Commander in Ultima 7.
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Aug 2, 2023 21:57
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You only have to read this part from the first book to realize how hosed the whole premise is for Agents of Edgewatch:quote:Each guard theoretically receives a modest stipend, but in practice only the top brass see any real compensation; the rank-and-file watch members’ wages are automatically garnished by the city to pay for food, training, uniforms, and lodging in the station’s barracks (regardless of whether the officers actually choose to stay there). The guards’ only actual means of earning liquid cash is by requisitioning possessions and money from any criminals they catch breaking major laws—no trial required. All findings are to be meticulously catalogued so as to prevent abuse of power, and any confiscated goods with identifiable owners must be returned. Absalom’s Grand Council insists that once the festival is over it will revise the budget and convert the Edgewatch to a normal pay structure. In the meantime, the public tolerates the guards’ summary justice, preferring it to the anarchy of an under-policed city.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:04
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drat, their police union suuuucks. Anyway very funny to realize that it's just describing normal adventurer poo poo you do being rob and loot the poo poo out of people you've taken on the role of judge jury and executioner for. Unless it has a name tag on it and you want to be magnanimous. Dexo fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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Aug 2, 2023 22:06
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One thing that turned me off running Agents of Edgewatch was how the players get equipment seemingly based on confiscation and civil forfeiture.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:11
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It's one thing to Do A Murderhobo because it's RPG convention and you're not thinking about it too deeply. It's another to to explicitly write it into the fiction as how the world works, in loving detail. Somewhere along the line, somebody should have raised their hand and said "uhhh guys this is hosed up."
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Aug 2, 2023 22:15
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I'm well aware. It was just something I found funny.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:18
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Okay, so outright just an excuse for why PCs can be cops but also won't get in trouble for looting everything they can off the people they "arrest." Something that could have been played in a kind of darkly funny way, but sounds like it went a little more uncomfortably sincere.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:21
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I guess you could play it as a "lawful" evil campaign and act like your Vic Mackey on The Shield or something. Taking advantage of your position but also trying to avoid getting caught. Civil forfeiture is even the major plot point for the season that Glenn Close is in.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:41
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disposablewords posted:Okay, so outright just an excuse for why PCs can be cops but also won't get in trouble for looting everything they can off the people they "arrest." Something that could have been played in a kind of darkly funny way, but sounds like it went a little more uncomfortably sincere. It's also a hacky way to give you interesting loot instead of giant sacks of gold without having to explain why your boss is a weirdo who pays his top detectives in a +2 flaming khopesh, a magical cat figurine and two bags of holding. So I get why it turned out like this, but it still makes me cringe.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:45
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Seems like a pretty accurate portrayal of cops. Should they have whitewashed policing instead? Wouldn't that be more gross? As is you have a blatantly evil campaign doing cop things. Also, kobold workers aren't dumb just because they don't know common. Why wouldn't they try to amplify the voice of more fluent speakers who are advocating on their behalf? KPC_Mammon fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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Aug 2, 2023 23:38
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cops that get paid by stealing poo poo doesn't really seem pro-cop maybe delete the line about the public "preferring" cops steal from them though
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Aug 3, 2023 00:00
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tbf, the "Public" writ large does feel exactly that way about cops. Even like people who do actually cognitively realize how lovely the police and cops are, will fall into trap of thinking that they do provide "security", and useful benefit to society. "The Public" isn't okay with the cops stealing from them, they are okay with the cops stealing from "them"(Others).
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Aug 3, 2023 00:09
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Lurks With Wolves posted:It's also a hacky way to give you interesting loot instead of giant sacks of gold without having to explain why your boss is a weirdo who pays his top detectives in a +2 flaming khopesh, a magical cat figurine and two bags of holding. So I get why it turned out like this, but it still makes me cringe. There are also points in the adventures where grateful citizens give you loot for helping them, which is perfectly normal in most D&D-style games but gets awkward when you're supposed to be law enforcement. I think it's certainly possible to do a fantasy city watch game without getting tangled up in the sins of real-world policing (see: Pratchett, T.), but Agents of Edgewatch ain't it.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:22
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Also, the premise is that the PCs aren't members of the usual city watch; they're basically some of the many temporary rent-a-cops hired specifically because of the massive spike in visitors and merchants resulting from the Golarion-equivalent World's Fair taking place during the AP. The civil forfeiture is still bogus, but that's the context. It's all basically a thin veneer for the PCs basically doing what all PCs typically do, rather than writing up a whole special subsystem for turning loot into salaries. And of course if you want the latter, then I think there's a variant for that in the Gamemastery Guide anyway.
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Aug 3, 2023 03:02
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I mean not to get too real world political here but if you're a cop engaging in strike breaking / breaking up protests and protecting wealth and business interests is a big part of the -actual- job?
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Aug 3, 2023 03:29
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boy how about that Kineticist huh what a real cool class can't wait to play one
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Aug 3, 2023 03:54
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I want to play a cop kineticist
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Aug 3, 2023 04:08
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Kineticists are excellent. Will probably end up being in one of my favorite classes (but obviously I need to actually play one in practice first)
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Aug 3, 2023 04:12
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I've been toying with a Conrasu Wood Kineticist. Absurd hp total and the racial feats, at 17th level you can heal each party member once per day for 17d8 hp with a 10 minute rest, and yourself for 17d8 hp with every 10 minute rest.
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Aug 3, 2023 04:43
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