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I think you're doing the heavy lifting with these plutonium bees, my friend. In fact that's a real complaint I have about every OSR game I've read - there's a huge gap between the information given and any kind of play, and since the text itself dwells on sudden PC death, the various things they definitely cannot do, and things which are very cool to look at but very abstruse to interact with, GMs are inevitably going to find it easier to go down those alleys than to try and interact with the players constructively (unless the players want the very specific flavor of sudden PC death amid lush lore and weird surroundings). Archaeans are similar, honestly: Extremely fun concept, florid description, evocative etc etc but the information you have available is about how to fight them and some fetch quests they might ask for, and what they could pay you in. There's not enough information to really generate Archaean plot points that aren't already on the page. You'll be doing all the heavy lifting to make them have a society or relationships with anything, and even more heavy lifting to turn that into something players can interact with outside the very OSR standards of fight and get paid to fight something else. My big examples of this would be The Crawling God and Tower of the Stargazer - two OSR adventures I got pointed to as great examples of the genre. The Crawling God has two modes of play in it, one of which is 'horror movie with a slime monster in a maze' which seems pretty cool but very limited (but, sure, it's what I was told I'd get) and a much, much more lavish section that's just 'here's a bunch of magic items that will probably kill the party, or at least make them very unhappy.' And then... that's it, that's the game. Tower of the Stargazer is even worse, since it's intentionally unfriendly to players and justifies it with 'well you're breaking into this guy's house, he wouldn't design it to be easy to break into!' - it's clear the writers expect 'the players lose one or two of their number, make a very powerful enemy, and get away with some cursed items and not much real treasure' to be the most likely outcome. There's precisely one mode of play OSR seems to want to support, as a rule, and it's a particularly odd one by my lights. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Jul 11, 2017 |
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Jul 11, 2017 03:51
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Nuns with Guns posted:Someone made an online generator for REIGN if you want to try it out, too By 'over' do you mean that it is a well-realized etc rather than a mash-up? Or that it's both, with the well-realized etc layered on top of a lazy mash-up? I'd believe both, having just seen 'Simplified Imperial China, with dragon mutation' in the F&F on Glorantha.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:03
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Thanks for the clarification! I'm interested, how does the thread feel about Exalted's setting? I'm speaking here of the human (and I guess demonic) societies, rather than specifically player-aligned organizations and factions, since I've always found the cultures of Creation (and Autochthonia) the high point of the writing.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:35
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Oh, I should be clear, I've read most of Exalted (particularly 2e but also Scavenger Sons, Games of Divinity, etc); I just wanted to know how people feel it holds up, given how Glorantha is often discussed as a certain pinnacle of textured RPG fantasy societies. Thank you for the rundown, though, since I consistently forget that the Aspect books exist and I should read them. I do need to get Houses of the Bull God, though, as the Harborhead sections in 2e were frankly insufficient to my needs. ...I do feel like I should point out, An-Teng (from Blood and Salt and basically repeated more or less word-for-word in 2e's region books) is more Southeast than South Asian, having a lot of cultural markers for Thailand, Indonesia, etc. It is also excellent. Also, I never quite got the appeal of the Forest Witches, but I'm reliably informed that's due to my bad taste, not the setting.
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Sep 24, 2017 21:26
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I feel as though it's possible to say 'games can be flawed' or even 'this game is too bad to play' and also 'charop can be massively unfun for other players at the table, so maybe have some care.' Like, for a non-elfgames example, my fencing coach recently told me about a guy he knew who used to, and may still, modify his foil jacket for electric foil. Not in any way that was against the rules - he would add Teflon to the wire jacket that makes the connection with the point of the foil, ensuring that glancing hits really slid off and wouldn't press the button on the tip; he would hem up the shoulders of the jacket into something more like a tank top, reducing the target area by an inch or two on the shoulders. None of this was ever a problem for him in terms of the rules, in any way. It was fully allowed. But fencing's a sport undertaken with other people, and the point of the sport is, indeed, to win the bout - but it's still seen as breaking the basic social contract to eke out advantages in this way. That's about how I feel about aggressive charop; it's fine if everyone in the group is into that, and like literally any other part of RPG-playing, should be discussed like mature adults. Just because something is allowed by the sort of necessarily flawed RAW doesn't mean a player who does it is in line, in the same way that a GM is rarely restrained by the rules from being an absolute shitheel, but also shouldn't do that. Maybe I'm just pessimistic; I expect most RPGs to contain some kind of weird mechanical lacunae, simply because they're complex systems built in a hobbyist industry, and even much more professional games industry things like AAA video games also often have massive bugs. It's just not reasonable to expect every game people might want to play to be perfectly constructed, so having social agreements that make sure everyone involved have a good time is already necessary. Why can't that extend to include 'please don't make a character that will completely outshine the rest of the group' the same way one generally doesn't have one player start with way more EXP or stuff than the rest? I mean, part of the problem is that some games (Including, sadly, Exalted 3e) can lead to unfortunate differences between characters due to poor character building design. That's a sign, in my view, to have the group generally agree about how optimized their characters should be, and definitely grounds for players to consider editing their character sheets (or getting free stuff to make up) if serious issues arise in play. Anyways, that's my 2c. tl;dr, RAW is always going to be flawed and whether or not those flaws are exacerbated by player or GM action can seriously change how much the game is playable. Having a social contract to try and generally keep the party on the same page in terms of mechanical effectiveness is no different from any other OOC agreement to make the game work.
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Sep 27, 2017 06:30
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For the record, I absolutely think there's a threshold of how flawed a game is before it's not worth trying to hold it together that way. D&D is the Monopoly or Risk of RPGs; tons of people are going to play it and try to extract a good experience from it, but it's absolutely poorly designed for that. But 'games are written by fallible, often undercompensated people' is hardly a radical opinion; game devs constantly talk about what they wish they had changed or done differently. In which case, why not start from the position of 'we should make sure this game is fun for all the players?' A better game makes play easier and reduces the chances of this, certainly. But the group doesn't necessarily want to play the most mechanically perfect game, as opposed to the game with the setting and genre that appeals at the moment. I'm currently running Mage: the Awakening 2e, rather than Fellowship, even though I'm certain Fellowship is more mechanically balanced and streamlined, because we wanted to play the Mage setting and didn't want to homebrew literally everything to make it work. Also, homebrew is absolutely going to be flawed; when I've made systems for settings I wrote myself they've been easily broken, because I'm not an experienced or particularly talented designer. Does this mean we should just never do that, since any player who can break that open has license to do so?
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Sep 27, 2017 17:40
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I think it's intended to be like the Lavender Panic in our own society - intelligence organizations and government posts were purged of 'known homosexuals' because it was perceived that being gay was a secret you could be blackmailed with. So gay civil servants were to be fired, because they could be blackmailed with their gay behavior, because if it came out they would be fired. You may notice some circular reasoning in that. In any case I imagine the idea was that Rokugan has every other standard prejudice in some form, there ought to be Rokugani homophobia of some degree. Which is an attitudes I've seen in RPG discussion before.
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Oct 21, 2017 20:32
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Libertad! posted:Strangely I am not surprised that a White Wolf book has regressive views, but what the hell happened with Hagen? Did he go Full Fash, or is it more "I'd much rather live in a white ethnostate than a Cultural Marxist dictatorship" cryptosignalling? Either way's bad, but this sounds like a hell of a story behind it. Nothing so brazen, he just thinks liberals will defeat Nazis if they allow themselves to be beaten up and get media attention for it. Basically, that 'you punch a Nazi and you lose the moral high ground' BS. Because apparently the only moral issue with Nazis is that they occasionally punch people?
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Jan 10, 2018 07:51
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I for one like Exalted 3 and have no idea what the RPGnet drama around it was. I am interested in something about its production though - there was a lot of hay made about its layout being special and unique, and I have no idea what that ended up being/not being. Anyone know what was up with Ex3 layout hype?
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Feb 12, 2018 04:50
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