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skaianDestiny posted:It would've been much better if the inner workings of Union wasn't delved into and thus subject to the scrutiny that shows that, yeah, it's definitely not the utopia the books try to paint it as. Yeah sure "utopia is a process" and all but it's hard to believe that Union can't do anything about Harrison Armory's imperialism when in Lancer Battlegroup a single Union fleet beats the poo poo out of all the KTB and HA fleets in the area without taking much losses. But they don’t try to paint it as this perfect utopia and then switch it out later, the kind of points people are bringing up about how there is this internal conflict in an ostensibly utopian government system are largely from the core book. Check out violence in lancer, 356 in the core. quote:It's the issue with wanting to have a constant state of low level conflict to justify using machines of war while also eating your utopia cake. It just kind of muddles everything up. I feel it would've been much better if something like the Long Rim was the primary setting of Lancer, where the remnants of megacorps are doing their capitalist shittery (thus justifying the whole license thing) after being driven off from core Union space, where Union acts as a distant "Big Good" to strive for but not examined closely. You could still have the "utopia is a process" thing by showing more Union-aligned places that have only recently been properly integrated still struggling to transition properly from their prior conditions and baggage. Well for everyone except Union the conflict is not low level. “For them the day my Liberation Team descended to free the inhabitants of Giza III from the Prime Mechapharoah and his hordes is regarded as the mostly important day in their history, a national holiday taught in schools. For me it was a Tuesday.” The galactic scale of Lancer means you can have planetary conflicts larger than any conflict in IRL human history or most RPGs (excepting planar stuff like the Blood War in DnD) and for them to not eve be the focus of your campaign, just something that some random NPC mentions is happening on the other side of the galaxy to give some flavour. Also personal tastes vary, but for me having the Utopian faction be a work in progress with internal contradictions both makes sense and makes it more interesting because I very rarely think “Wow, I really wish this new setting I’m reading about had less nuance and presented the sides as a more Saturday Morning Cartoonish good vs bad situation.”
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Sep 10, 2023 08:53
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Lancer is a lot like Disco Elysium, in that there are several perfectly valid reasons for not liking it, but there are also... telling reasons for not liking it.
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Sep 10, 2023 08:57
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girl dick energy posted:This is not a Gum-Gum.
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Sep 10, 2023 13:14
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Rexxed posted:Sorry to introduce a tangent to the lancer thread, but this man is theoretical hard drive royalty. It's nerdy and fanciful, so I figured KSBD readers, I mean lancer critics, might enjoy: good
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Sep 10, 2023 15:47
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girl dick energy posted:Lancer is a lot like Disco Elysium, in that there are several perfectly valid reasons for not liking it, but there are also... telling reasons for not liking it. #1 reason for not liking lancer is that you're fash #2 is that you lack imagination.
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Sep 10, 2023 15:47
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#3 is because you can't get past the shivers check on the ladder.
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Sep 10, 2023 16:52
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#4 is that you don't really like the genre, so you don't know much about the game except what you've picked up through pop-culture osmosis.
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Sep 10, 2023 19:14
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#5 single-operator mechs are functionally just tall dudes, games about them would be better if they were about roleplaying Shaq with a gun
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Sep 10, 2023 19:33
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I have always just used ttrpgs as rule books that you write your own original setting and content so when my Lancer stuff came and had like a ton of setting and backstory stuff I was straight up baffled by it because I could not imagine actually using any of that stuff. In retrospect I think that approach is totally common in a lot of the rule systems I don’t play like Vampire and Shadowrun and so forth. But I genuinely was not sure to do with all of it or why it was there.
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Sep 10, 2023 20:10
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I don’t play TTRPGs because I’m an adult with a job
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Sep 10, 2023 20:17
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#6 you live in a right-to-work state and any voluntary association with the dread word "UNION" will put you at risk of being excommunicated from your health care.
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Sep 10, 2023 20:36
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E. Revenant posted:#6 you live in a right-to-work state and any voluntary association with the dread word "UNION" will put you at risk of being excommunicated from your health care. Too real.
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Sep 10, 2023 20:39
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E. Revenant posted:#6 you live in a right-to-work state and any voluntary association with the dread word "UNION" will put you at risk of being excommunicated from your health care. An automated system which identifies online accounts used by employees and monitors your postings has flagged you for dismissal as a result of this post.
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Sep 10, 2023 20:46
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Bleck posted:I don’t play TTRPGs because I’m an adult with a job maybe, one day, everyone's schedules will line up
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Sep 10, 2023 20:46
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Runa posted:maybe, one day, everyone's schedules will line up *monkey's paw curls* They do, and then you spend all evening catching up and shooting the poo poo and never get around to playing.
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Sep 10, 2023 21:36
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In Lancer i have a little dog drone and today it ran up to someone and barked lightning at them, and then when I hacked them it barked even MORE lightning at them, and a round later when my ally shot at them my dog opened up its little dog mouth and shot a machine gun at them, and that's why Lancer rules hth.
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Sep 11, 2023 00:32
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:#5 single-operator mechs are functionally just tall dudes, games about them would be better if they were about roleplaying Shaq with a gun
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Sep 11, 2023 02:53
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girl dick energy posted:This is not a Gum-Gum. ¿%:?EXTR!UDE FRUIT GUM: GUM
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Sep 11, 2023 04:26
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skaianDestiny posted:It would've been much better if the inner workings of Union wasn't delved into and thus subject to the scrutiny that shows that, yeah, it's definitely not the utopia the books try to paint it as. Yeah sure "utopia is a process" and all but it's hard to believe that Union can't do anything about Harrison Armory's imperialism when in Lancer Battlegroup a single Union fleet beats the poo poo out of all the KTB and HA fleets in the area without taking much losses. Pretty much all of this yeah. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea that Union has a literal Dune style aristocratic oligarchy and cyberpunk corporations as things that hold power/seats/representation within their democracy, but presenting this as not fundamentally compromising Union beyond recovery demonstrates that the writer doesn’t really understand the ideas they’re toying with. Union possess literal post scarcity level technology, it and the megacorps are existential threats to one another by definition. No amount of peaceful co-existence is meaningfully possible, and I never got the sense that anyone involved actually understood that. Because as presented, it is a setting where the megacorps have already won that existential life or death struggle but the writing consistently doesn’t present it as such. Captain Oblivious fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Sep 11, 2023 |
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Sep 11, 2023 05:53
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What the gently caress are you people talking about
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Sep 11, 2023 06:05
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Lancer! It's if K6BD was in space and instead of getting a name of god stuck in your forehead you befriend an individuated instance of the cosmic onemind who thinks it's a sarcastic AI that helps your robot do fun stuff in space, like play pinball with enemy mechs using drones that are just your mech's extra arms. It's especially relevant to K6BD because the main galactic superpower is like the new Celestial Republic where it's trying real hard to do good but in life there are no real victory conditions and Things Just Keep Happening and yeah sometimes that thing is a giant destructive force that quotes war poetry before committing war crimes yeah. also you know made by the same person who is making K6BD so really it's like a 30 degree tangent at MOST
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Sep 11, 2023 06:22
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FlocksOfMice posted:Lancer! It's if K6BD was in space and instead of getting a name of god stuck in your forehead you befriend an individuated instance of the cosmic onemind who thinks it's a sarcastic AI that helps your robot do fun stuff in space, like play pinball with enemy mechs using drones that are just your mech's extra arms. We're also talking about Disco Elysium, a point-and-click adventure game/RPG that doesn't have any creative team in common with Lancer or K6BD. But DE, like Lancer, also has most of the genuine criticism about it getting undermined and drowned out by the very loud contingent of cryptofascists who're mad at the game for making fun of their politics. Edit: Imagine the reaction if the next page has Allison look directly at the camera and say "Solomon David was wrong and anyone who thinks otherwise is a quisling, a moron, or a sociopath." Would this be a little hamfisted and difficult to defend from an artistic perspective? Yes, but it'd also be A) funny as hell, and B) difficult to criticize without getting lumped in with the Very Mad Fascists blowing up the comments section. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Sep 11, 2023 |
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Sep 11, 2023 08:30
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girl dick energy posted:Edit: Imagine the reaction if the next page has Allison look directly at the camera and say "Solomon David was wrong and anyone who thinks otherwise is a quisling, a moron, or a sociopath." Would this be a little hamfisted and difficult to defend from an artistic perspective? Yes, but it'd also be A) funny as hell, and B) difficult to criticize without getting lumped in with the Very Mad Fascists blowing up the comments section.
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Sep 11, 2023 10:04
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girl dick energy posted:This, yeah. It's a tabletop RPG about mech pilots that borrows a lot of conceptual/thematic ideas from K6BD, and a lot of mechanical ideas from D&D 4e and Battletech. The funniest thing about Disco Elysium is the karaoke scene. The second funniest thing is the amount of streamers whining about how the game was calling them a racist and a fascist bastard within a few hours.
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Sep 11, 2023 10:36
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I will forever maintain that the 'failed' karaoke scene is way better than the successful karaoke scene not just because the performance is extremely raw, but because Kim unironically likes it and praises you for it, even if no one else present does. All because he sees it for what it actually is: a desperate expression of the raw humanity and agony that's been boiling inside of you. In other words, art as a means of expression in its purest form, and the entire reason you needed to sing it so urgently at all, to try and get some of it out. He puts aside all concerns about quality and sees you and what you're expressing, and he has love, empathy, and respect for what he sees there. I get so loving emotional about Kim Kitsuragi and the sheer humanity, patience, and love he shows to the protagonist of DE, despite him being an emotional catastrophe of a man slowly putting himself back together from nothing. At the heart of DE I see a story about what it's like to fall apart and rebuild yourself piece by piece when you aren't even sure who you are anymore, and find others are more willing to accept you than you ever thought possible - even having seen all of your flaws, deep as they are, having clawed inescapably to the forefront of you to sit on raw display, any pretense or disguise now shattered and drowning in old coping mechanisms behind you. Anyway, really good game. I definitely understand why people can criticize it in non-fascist ways, but it meant so much to me sentimentally that I find it hard to see it through a critical lens, almost like an old nostalgia game from one's childhood. I might be the only one thinking this but I hope we see more of Incubus soon. I hate to admit it but I think he's kind of my favorite character in the comic? I can't help it, I love lovely beautiful men who learn all the wrong lessons in life. Sorry Maya.
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Sep 11, 2023 12:15
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I actually only wrote about 20% of the lore for Lancer, I was the game designer and not the writer. The core setting and most of the lore was written by my good friend and professional writer Miguel Lopez, who currently works on Magic the Gathering. All the more hard military sci fi/revolutionary stuff and most of the more lyric or mystic sounding AI stuff was written by him. All the weird stuff around the fringes was created or written by me, such as the Voladores, Sparri, the original concept for the KTB, most of the Long Rim book. I also conceptualized of all the mechs in their base form and wrote most of the existing lore for HORUS. The rest is Lopez. I think you can see some of my touch on it but it's definitely his kind of writing/setting. He's also a big communist so the disco elysium comparisons are apt I think.
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Sep 11, 2023 12:37
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Tiny Myers posted:I might be the only one thinking this but I hope we see more of Incubus soon. I hate to admit it but I think he's kind of my favorite character in the comic? I can't help it, I love lovely beautiful men who learn all the wrong lessons in life. Sorry Maya. I feel like Incubus's remaining part in the story will be relatively short because he's kind of already complete as a character: we know his relationship with Allison and Maya, his worldview, his strengths and limitations. He's an avatar of the inevitable violence that dominates the Wheel and that Allison is on her way toward transcending. Also it would be hard for him to top Cio's death in term of narrative impact. Still, their inevitable confrontation will probably be very dramatic. He's her most personal adversary and the one that's most like herself, even her new self: he agrees with her that immediate action matters more than anything, and that the struggle is endless, even if the big difference between them is that he believes all actions must serve the war of all against all. Which is to say that his return is the part of the comic I'm currently most hyped for.
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Sep 11, 2023 12:48
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Communism is a continuous disco motion.
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Sep 11, 2023 13:13
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since he's literally a Final Fantasy villain I hope he goes through at least 3 more boss forms before he goes down
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Sep 11, 2023 13:53
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the holy poopacy posted:since he's literally a Final Fantasy villain I hope he goes through at least 3 more boss forms before he goes down If he doesn't sprout a wing at some point i'll be big mad. Also, I like the Lancer background and the presence of entities other than Union don't negate that Union has created nigh post-scarcity luxury gay space communism in parts of the galaxy. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Sep 11, 2023 |
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Sep 11, 2023 14:28
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Hey, since we’re talking about Disco Elysium and tabletop RPGs, would I be remiss in posting a link to the DE-inspired TTRPG I released a couple weeks ago?
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Sep 11, 2023 16:53
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Don't you dare
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Sep 11, 2023 17:05
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girl dick energy posted:Lancer is a lot like Disco Elysium, in that there are several perfectly valid reasons for not liking it, but there are also... telling reasons for not liking it. The mech stuff is fun, I just wish the setting chapter had more concrete setting details; the setting chapter gives such a broad picture view of everything that there is basically nothing to latch onto for me when I make a player character for this game. To pick a RPG book that I have the inverse reaction to (where I love the setting but am not at all a fan of the mechanics), the latest iteration of Runequest is incredibly focused on grounding your character within the setting. Every adventurer rolls up a family history of what their grandparents, parents, and themselves were doing during the big events in their generation, each potential homeland in the game is written up in vivid detail that will inform you what an adventurer from those places might act like, and your various cult write-ups give you an understanding of how each god wants their worshipers to behave. You come out of character creation knowing exactly what your player character acts like, what they do, and which political leaders or bodies they favor or hate. If it were written like LANCER's setting chapter, you'd have digressions into Orlanthi clan ring voting procedures, Esrolian naval tactics, the various branches one might find in the Lunar bureaucracy, and other things that honestly are better left in the background since they don't relate to adventuring, and probably no mention of Dragon Pass and Pavis or any of the major players in the setting.
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Sep 11, 2023 17:15
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Farg posted:Don't you dare ok
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Sep 11, 2023 17:54
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I think they were joking about it being addictive. I'd like to see it.
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Sep 11, 2023 17:56
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Ah! I just didn’t want to further derail, though I guess we are in the ‘slowly building frenzy’ part of the (accidental, hard drive related) hiatus. The game’s called Detect Or Die and it’s basically built on the core structures of the indie game Bluebeard’s Bride but with the core genre apparatus of horror replace with empiricism - I can give a longer spiel about the structure, but suffice to say I’m proud of it. The game’s here on Itch: https://silk-stone.itch.io/detect-or-die Setting-agnostic but scenario-specific to that crux of amnesia, mystery, and science fiction that makes DE what it is. I’m hoping to put out some free case files when grad school stops kicking my rear end for a minute, hopefully by October.
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Sep 11, 2023 18:02
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Whirling posted:The mech stuff is fun, I just wish the setting chapter had more concrete setting details; the setting chapter gives such a broad picture view of everything that there is basically nothing to latch onto for me when I make a player character for this game. To pick a RPG book that I have the inverse reaction to (where I love the setting but am not at all a fan of the mechanics), the latest iteration of Runequest is incredibly focused on grounding your character within the setting. Every adventurer rolls up a family history of what their grandparents, parents, and themselves were doing during the big events in their generation, each potential homeland in the game is written up in vivid detail that will inform you what an adventurer from those places might act like, and your various cult write-ups give you an understanding of how each god wants their worshipers to behave. You come out of character creation knowing exactly what your player character acts like, what they do, and which political leaders or bodies they favor or hate. If it were written like LANCER's setting chapter, you'd have digressions into Orlanthi clan ring voting procedures, Esrolian naval tactics, the various branches one might find in the Lunar bureaucracy, and other things that honestly are better left in the background since they don't relate to adventuring, and probably no mention of Dragon Pass and Pavis or any of the major players in the setting. nothing's going to beat Glorantha stuff on that front unless some guy with a degree in Giant Robot Studies gets 50 years to fiddle with it (and lots of the earlier books are huge digressive messes), but yeah it's a little like if Runequest mentioned but had zero mechanical support for gods and magic. The core book has this elevator pitch of a setting that's fundamentally different from the standard TTRPG sci-fi infinite warfare generators in ways that seem like they should impact how you approach things, but no indication of how and a lot of conflicting information on how meaningful it even is, and then you get the showcase for how those concepts translate into actual gameplay in No Room for a Wallflower and the answer is you're doing space Vietnam. utopia is constant improvement, indeed anyway don't really wanna poo poo on the game this just kinda bugged me when I read through the materials to try and set something up with my friends, and then I run into other people on SA who've read it and see something very different so I'm picking at it. The robots are sweet as hell USHABTI is an excellent name for a weird magic gun A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Sep 11, 2023 |
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Sep 11, 2023 18:30
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Captain Oblivious posted:Pretty much all of this yeah. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea that Union has a literal Dune style aristocratic oligarchy and cyberpunk corporations as things that hold power/seats/representation within their democracy, but presenting this as not fundamentally compromising Union beyond recovery demonstrates that the writer doesn’t really understand the ideas they’re toying with. I see it differently. Suppose you have a post-scarcity economy, you *can* do anything, but what is the limit? Will. Like, the human will to get up and do A Thing. Some people can be motivated by the greater good, some by their family, some by Ye Olde Hedonic Treadmill. Megacorps gather up the last category and harness that will to just... do things, do the 9-to-5, and so they have some measure at success simply because they have people doing things, leveraging the tech. And if it's a post-scarcity society, and you can do what you want, how are you gonna say no to a bunch of people getting together and doing what they want? Now, obviously, the OUTPUT of a megacorp or the individual actions of people and factions within it may need to be shot down, but it's a balancing act. And I'd wager that, largely, the Union might benefit from a bunch of people motivated to go out and do things, even if those motivations are incredibly backwards.
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Sep 11, 2023 20:23
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M_Gargantua posted:Communism is a continuous disco motion.
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Sep 11, 2023 20:42
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don't think there'd be much Royalty under communism
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Sep 11, 2023 20:49
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