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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I know this was probably discussed when it came out but what's the deal with Mummy: the Curse? It sounds interesting, better than OWoD Mummy for sure, but mummies seem like loners. From what I've read they also seem to suffer from the same problems as Geist, immortality, power level, being hard to take down, and not really having a community like most the other supernaturals. It's a bunch of good ideas, executed fairly poorly. The whole premise is based around mummies who are dead most of the time and are awakened by their cults or by disturbance of their tombs for brief-ish periods of activity. This premise isn't very friendly to games of more than two people, so that the Storytelling section on how to set up a group of players is basically all about how to ignore or work around the basic premise of the game. The book also gives vast wordcounts to things that aren't important (like, the Y-splat Guilds of the past and all the magical items they built in the past, which mummies don't actually know how to build themselves), but fails to give any wordcount to a bunch of important things (like what the Guilds actually do in the present). Seriously, the Guilds supposedly still exist even though mummies are mostly amnesiacs, don't actually know how to perform the work of the guild without their sorcerous masters to do the real magic, and spend most of their time as lifeless corpses. How does that lead to a social grouping at any level more complex than a biannual tea party? It's actually really obvious that somebody decided to cut out all the wordcount related to subjects that would eventually get their own books: Guilds, the Decieved, and the Sothic Turns all get essentially no space in the book, so that the elements that were important enough to merit further attention aren't actually usable with just the core. Even the secret ST section doesn't really tell you anything more about the Deceived than the player section does. The book is a colossal failure of editing. Oh, and to top it all off, it's divided between player and ST sections so that you can't actually discuss the major theme of the game without spoiler bars.
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Apr 2, 2013 19:09
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MalcolmSheppard posted:You started complaining on RPGnet before you saw a single word in the book, based on the fact that you didn't like CA Suleiman's picture in the Kickstarter. Not so! You have confused me with someone else. Ettin is a murder bear who likes Danganronpa. I am a candle who likes Nobilis. The difference is critical! I was complaining before I saw a single word in the book because the Kickstarter was a truly wretched example of a pitch that refused for some reason to explain the actual premise of the game. quote:2) Collecting Relics is pretty important, which is why there's space devoted to them. If you missed that . . . oh man. I can see that relics are important, but the Guild writeups go on and on about making stuff to the point that you'd be justified in coming away from those passage under the impression that the Arisen actually know how to make that stuff. Which they don't. The writeups are far too focused on philosophical or historical stuff and don't give enough time to the more important points like "how does this social structure function when the entire membership is catatonic partial amnesiacs?" which would have been more helpful. quote:3) No, that's not what happened. I'm pretty curious about how it turned out exactly that way, then, because the relation between "things that don't get nearly enough wordcount in the core" and "things that have books scheduled later" is so exact that it's hard to believe it wasn't deliberate. quote:I'm not sure what you want out of Sothic Turns besides what's there. Enough data about the previous turns to actually play in one other than 2012? Honestly, it reminds me a lot of Mummy: the Resurrection, which, although this didn't become obvious until you actually paid attention, really really wanted you to play a game in the Middle East, to the point that leaving the Middle East was actually impracticable even for the splat who had "extra facility with Sekhem" as their thing. Unfortunately, the game didn't really give enough support for "games in the modern Middle East" to make that really workable for the average white American gamer. quote:Yes, the knowledge divide is intentional. The game was not designed as an Internet Discussion Device, but an actual RPG for people to play. I guess that's a worthy goal, but I don't know if it's really a good idea to make the game difficult to talk about in order to accomplish it.
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Apr 3, 2013 04:06
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I think it's an open secret that the God-Machine Chronicles is nWoD Revised, and Blood and Smoke is Requiem Revised. They just couldn't get approval from the suits to actually call it that. But there's a reason that God-Machine + Blood & Smoke is sufficent to play Requiem on its own.
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Apr 9, 2013 21:39
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They're fairly good, and getting better. In many older cases they're unquestionably better than the original stuff (a lot of oWoD stuff fell apart, which this does not). In some cases, the ink doesn't sit as well on the paper as it does in traditional print. This is usually the case in books with dark layouts, like Alchemicals or Broken-Winged Crane. It's still perfectly readable, though. Books written since the jump to PoD tend to have layouts that keep that in mind and look perfectly fine. In general, I'd say DTRPG's PoD titles are good quality and likely to keep improving. They're also good about letting you return things that have problems.
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Apr 15, 2013 19:38
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Swagger Dagger posted:The wait for God-Machine has felt super long the last few days since it's apparently just waiting on Drive-Thru to put it up. No, they're waiting on proof copies, which means that DTRPG has to print a copy and mail it to Rich. If he sees no errors, then it goes live.
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Apr 16, 2013 05:31
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DJ Dizzy posted:What was wrong with oChangeling? Was it just plain bad? Changeling: the Dreaming was interesting and even frequently good, but it was never completely consistent in its presentation and it's aged very badly. Much like how the "freedom-loving wizards versus oppressive scientists" conflict in Ascension looks completely different in a world where science is actively under attack by magical thinkers in high places, the "working a day job kills your soul, and trying to understand the world and use 'reason' ruins everything" which Dreaming cannot shut up about for two minues looks very different to people who have actually graduated from college and found that they did, in fact, still have a soul. I hope that C20, if it should exist, makes more substantive updates so that people can actually look at the game without raising their eyebrows all the way off their head. Kind of like Demon: the Fallen, Changeling doesn't want a round-up and anniversary, it wants the Revised edition it never got.
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Apr 20, 2013 05:27
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Bite your goddamned tongue. You... don't want it to exist? /looks up Huh, I guess you don't. Well, I do.
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Apr 20, 2013 06:06
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quote:Law is an expression of pure imagination, because it does not exist naturally in any form. It is a product of the human mind, created by literally millenia of jurists with hundreds of philosophies and millions of distinct viewpoints. To discount it as just 'lol rigid and boring' is trite and uneducated. Aw, yeah, law. Have you ever read Lud-in-the-mist, a 1920s fantasy novel that touches on these concepts? quote:If it does exist, I hope to hell it gets rid of the mechanically reinforced pedophilia. I wouldn't say "mechanically reinforced pedophilia" so much as a completely wonky approach to age all around. Supposedly, according to the rules and the descriptions of seemings, almost all changelings are teenagers or younger and hardly anybody makes it to 30 without being Undone. You wouldn't know that from looking at the art or the important plot NPCs, though. (Theoretically you can get that old by living in a freehold all the time, but that should leave you stark raving Bedlam.) (So the Accordance War was fought between kids and college students, which either makes it more interesting or more ridiculous, I can't decide which.) The game is also really inconsistent about remembering that changelings have fairly decent continuity of memory and identity between incarnations.
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Apr 20, 2013 06:46
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Loomer posted:Between my incredibly common and severe allergies and my love of law, I must make hangelings wither and die in my presence. To be fair, so does anybody over thirty, including, eventually, themselves.
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Apr 20, 2013 18:21
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Nick at Nite posted:Jumped when I saw an update on White Wolf's shop on DriveThruRPG, but looks like it's just another new Convention book for M:tAs. You could say that, yes, insofar as the flames have yet to completely die down. (Mage deliberately involved itself in real-world ideological differences from the beginning, and then made things even hotter via some very questionable shifts in approach over the course of the line.) Also, the last Convention Book, New World Order, was really good.
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Apr 22, 2013 21:54
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Fuzz posted:Excluding the Syndicate book, pretty much everything with Revised Technocracy was awesome and cool. It just went totally off the rails into this awesome cyberpunk/sci-fi place and just did not give two fucks about anything else. There was no Revised Syndicate book. Although there's one in editing now! Iteration X was the only convention that got a Revised book (I thought theirs was a bit dull.)
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Apr 22, 2013 23:16
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MalcolmSheppard posted:The disadvantage is that our terseness didn't lead to a lot of hand-holding. Basically, in a lot of books the writers waste word count saying "This system is so awesome for this reason, why don't we sell you this system in the book you already bought!" You will superficially agree with me that this wordcount wastes space, but I see people respond to it *all the time*, and omitting it is actually kind of risky. After helping out with a bunch of Chuubo manuscripts, all I can say is "don't I know it."
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May 28, 2013 20:54
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Mexcillent posted:Changeling20 otoh would require so much work to be slightly coherent I don't even know how the development cycle would work on that Basically, you'd want C20 to be stealth Changeling Revised. Or just go ahead and start working on non20 revised editions of the oWoD games, I guess. M20 is nice, but I also wouldn't mind having an updated version that runs on the God-Machine rules and isn't obligated to keep all the aggressively 90s elements.
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Jun 26, 2013 18:03
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Ascension without the aggressivly 90s elements just isn't Ascension. It's the game where perkygoth witches fight the Terminator. I agree that abandoning those elements would be a terrible way to do an anniversary edition, but I'd really like a game that is like Ascension but not completely out of date. Something like "Mage: the Dirty Version," but hopefully one that resists the temptation to call itself "Mage: the New Millenium" as I seem to recall Brucato was threatening to do. (We want to go two decades ahead, not one!
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Jun 26, 2013 23:18
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Mexcillent posted:No one "got it" until like halfway through Revised's cycle: the entire premise of consensual reality and a war to define it was actually a fake lie created by archmages to deal with petty personal differences. Or rather, somebody decided halfway through to announce that the game's eponymous conflict was a lie. That certainly wasn't the intention from the beginning.
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Jun 27, 2013 18:08
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Mage's development has been pretty complicated, and in some ways more unified than people think, and in other ways, less. For example, the O NOEZ BLEW EVERYTHING UP starts in 1996 with the novels, right around 2nd Edition's release. Sam Chupp said the Ascension War was over way back on Usenet in 94-95, and this was pretty much the stance of 1e. The adventure Loom of Fate had nothing to do with global paradigm shifting and everything to do with tweaking a Weaver spirit girl. Very few things in the game have anything to do with a global paradigm conflict because 1) this was mostly settled and 2) the idea that the Traditions are interested in running reality was pretty much never true. That's interesting. I can believe that a number of people involved with Ascension thought of the Ascension War as being a pointless exercise, but I would have trouble believing that they all did. The Book of Worlds doesn't give me the impression that it was written by people who thought that battling for territory on the outer planets was pretty but ultimately self-defeating. This is probably why there are a number of writers today who are at least mildly interested in making sure that alternate conceptions of the setting remain clearly labelled as fanon: once people start playing gonzo games in the Umbra and having that playstyle supported by the books, it becomes impossible to dial that back without offending those players, no matter how deft you might be. (Of course, early Revised was the opposite of deft in easing players into the new areas of focus with preachiness and disdain for prior material. (Hopefully M20 avoids making the opposite mistake and disdaining Revised.) quote:Probably the biggest conceptual leap for nerds is that last point, because the Technocracy is a totalitarian program (not in the governmental sense, all the time, but in terms of an all-encompassing ideological mandate). The Traditions aren't like that and for the most part, never were, but part of the imperialist ideology the Technocracy is all about is the myth that If We Don't Do It, They Will. That's why modernity is preceded by Mythic Ages, not the Western Hermetic Age. Don't I know it. quote:This is something the old near-immortals are really into, though, and it's how they treat the Ascension War. Old Hermetics believe they're gonna just kill ranking Technocrats and sort the juniors into House Ex Misc or Thig or something. Conservatives in each of the Trads think they've fought these wars before, and believe they can win with Boss Fights and demands of tributes from the losers. To them space wars and finding Chosen Ones to Hero Journey at Big Bads is naturally the right way. And some gamers have trouble identifying this because this sounds like Objectively How Stories Happen to them. The conservative Trad victory condition is "We get our towers and people leave us alone or ask us for favours." I'm not sure how well the pre-Reckoning books got this concept across.
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Jun 28, 2013 20:22
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Well for a clear editorial signal, there's Porthos saying, "We're crazy assholes who are doing it wrong. I'm going to say this in a novel before I explode, I'm going to tell Mark Gillan and I'm going to write it in the introduction to the Fragile Path." I mean, the developer's mouthpiece saying the protagonists are doing it wrong is pretty much as direct as you can get. Well, sure, the stuff that was part of the lead-up to Revised took that stance! But I don't think that the books people are thinking of when they say "REVISED KILLED MY BABIES" took that stance. Specifically I am talking about things like The Book of Worlds (because, let's be honest, when people talk about things Revised killed, they generally do mean that particular book). I don't think the people who wrote that book did so while thinking "this stuff is fun, but it's ultimately counter-productive." My impression from reading that book was that it was written based on the premise that wizards attacking hyperscience Dyson Spheres was something cool that you could build a game around. I mean, I agree with what you're saying about how you can't win hearts and minds by exploding things nobody ever heard of out on Jupiter. That's a legitimate and more weighty take on the setting that led to a lot of good books. But from an out-of-game perspective, the earlier material for Ascension was successful in convincing people that blowing up Technocratic bases in the Umbra was fun, and the material from Revised and the lead-up to Revised was not successful in convincing those people that it was orthogonal to what they should be doing. In fact it mostly just made them angry by being too heavy-handed! Fortunately people seem to have learned from that transition. I'm pretty sure that, say, Exalted 3e will be removing a lot of things that were in Exalted 2e that people liked (magitech, the Reclamation, the Thousand Streams River), but it's going to do it by just not mentioning those names rather than having all the Reclamation Yozis give up and kill their GSPs by remote-control, and having them replaced with new-model GSPs.
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Jun 29, 2013 04:18
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INH5 posted:Sounds like a fiction anthology. Considering the pattern set by the GMC and B&S anthologies, I'd guess that we can expect a GMC-update Hunter Chronicle book sometime early next year. It sounds awesome, and I can't wait. It appears to be a book along the lines of "Witch Finders" for all the game lines that didn't get a hunterbook of their own.
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Jul 19, 2013 01:08
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God, I hope M20 is good. I've been seriously concerned by what I've heard from Brucato, and had my concerns somewhat allayed by Allen Varney's PR, and honestly I'm just not going to give any money unless I am able to get a good idea of what's in the product beforehand, even though this is the KS I've been waiting for all along. I don't want to pay for muddle-headed Mage. Honestly, I'm starting to regret the 20th Anniversary line. I mean, it's gorgeous, but it seems like it's become a stumbling block in the way of getting a mechanical system for these games that I'd actually want to use instead of just a varnished version of a 20-year-old block of crunch.
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Aug 19, 2013 21:15
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Yeah, I'm not sure if mages could be relied on to have the proper attitude of uncomprehending dread that makes the God-Machine a creepy antagonist for mortals. I mean, maybe they should but they probably won't.
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Aug 22, 2013 19:09
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I kind of wonder if Legacies should have Arcana requirements at all. Being able to cast without a Paradox is pretty nifty, but I feel like they'd be cooler if you weren't restricted to effects you could already cast as spells. (It would also make Legacies like the Tamers of Fire who don't adhere to the normal Arcana scheme feel more legitimate and less "pretend all you want, buddy, fire and inspiration aren't the same thing and I have the mechanics to prove it.")
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Sep 17, 2013 04:11
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Dreaming is basically several brilliant games sewn together into a single directionless Frankenstein trying to go three different ways at once. It also has a few core principles that probably made sense to the young people writing it, like "by the time you turn thirty your dreams will be dead," that don't make a lot of sense to the post-thirty readers of today.
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Oct 30, 2013 00:23
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Varjon posted:I just remembered, wasn't there supposed to be an nwod translation guide for Demon The Fallen that came before the new one, or at the same time or whatever? Did I completely miss that somehow? I was really looking forward to it. I have no idea how that was even going to work. Translating Fallen into Descent and vice versa seems a bit like translating Latin into C++, or at least "instructions for playing as Nanoha in Trail of Cthulhu."
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Nov 22, 2013 22:29
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INH5 posted:Can anyone figure out what this is actually supposed to mean in terms of concrete, mechanical effects? The general idea seems to be that pictures of vampires don't tend to come out right, and in terms of mirrors...I have absolutely no idea what's supposed to happen. This seems like the germ of a decent idea, but it wouldn't help me at all as a GM if a player says "I pull out my camera phone and take a picture of him. What does it look like?" or "I use my compact mirror to peak around the corner. Do I see anyone?" Vampires basically never show up in recordings or reflections, but this always looks like an irritating coincidence.
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Dec 19, 2013 00:27
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Changeling is the sort of game that could really benefit from something like the Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine rules that could actually make the "mundane" part of "balance magical and mundane lives" into part of the game rather than completely divorced from the system.
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Jan 18, 2014 00:23
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There's also a connection between "guy who sits on the top skimming the cream off of everything" and "blood-sucking parasite," so it's reasonable to assume that the guys who own everything are also Kindred.
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Feb 26, 2014 17:54
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Have we found out yet if he kept out paradigm information for fear of players doing real magic again?
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Mar 17, 2014 20:29
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Gilok posted:What is this from? It's from Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, specifically the Glass-Maker's Dragon campaign. ("Turning into a giant snake never helps" is exceptionally poignant there because Chuubo's most impressive power, other than having a marvelous engine that grants his every wish, is the ability to turn into a giant snake. That guy has a lot of powers for such an ordinary boy.)
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Apr 5, 2014 18:03
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The Mage 20th Anniversary Kickstarter ended about two weeks ago.
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Apr 16, 2014 05:53
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I think the main "threat" against Geist wouldn't be a threat. Sin-Eaters are very, very good at a) ruining people's days and b) not dying. They are not so hot at pretty much anything else. If you want to challenge a krewe of Sin-Eaters, you should ask them to help a ghost girl prevent her family from going bankrupt or something.
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Apr 16, 2014 22:47
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Mages are already getting obsession as their big theme, though. I don't think the Bound themselves need to be changed (although arranging things so that the name of the game and the name of the protagonists are the same would be nice). They just need more social structure and some environmental imperatives that give them something obvious to do, instead of "maybe help some ghosts? If you feel like it?" As it is, the game provides some suggestions, like your geist's wishes and things like abmortals and dangerous ghosts, but at a player level it feels like there's nothing pushing your player to dive into that after a lifetime of being a fairly ordinary mortal.
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Apr 17, 2014 02:55
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That's not even mentioning the ghoul mage rules.
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Apr 23, 2014 19:42
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Halloween Jack posted:The thing I don't understand is, if you have nuclear bombs, why do they need to be enchanted nuclear bombs? Will they not kill vampires unless they're holy water nuclear bombs? Is this RIFTS? I'm not sure if that's a meaningful question when you're talking about the Technocracy. They're science wizards, so all their advanced stuff is "enchanted" although that's not how they would describe it.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:16
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ErichZahn posted:How did V20 handle the Kuei-Jin? It mostly didn't. That would be a separate project. A project, which, incidentally, I have no idea how they'd handle in the modern age where slathering things in well-meaning Orientalism just doesn't fly. I can believe in somebody making a good game out of Changeling: the Dreaming (with some effort), but I have no idea how you could ever make Kindred of the East acceptable to today's audiences.
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Apr 28, 2014 03:26
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WiiFitForWindows8 posted:Oh my god, I want this book bad, but according to IanW, they wont have it available as a PoD until mid-may because reasons. They like to delay it for a couple of weeks because having all the fans reading the book tell you about typos turned out to be more efficient than any editing service you can name.
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Apr 30, 2014 20:37
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I'm not sure if mummies fit into a tier given their reversed power curve and the fact that they vary in power over time. A mummy at low Sekhem is probably equal to or weaker than a vampire, even if he's much stronger at high Sekhem.
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May 6, 2014 14:21
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SunAndSpring posted:We're back! Working on it. Solid enough so far. Meanwhile, Heirs to Hell was disappointing and kind of suffered from "it turns out that devoting a hundred pages to this topic kind of removes all the mystery and supposed rarity of the subject matter."
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Jun 26, 2014 03:36
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Bizarrely, the gadget rules talk about angels spotting flares of Aether, which is supposed to be something they specifically can never perceive.
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Jun 28, 2014 04:52
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I'd be interested in hearing more about First Nations cultures and their survival into the modern day from people who know things about them or can point me to good sources.
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Jul 3, 2014 04:14
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Mage the Ascension 20th Anniversary has also been kept mostly under wraps.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:54
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