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Mexcillent posted:Got it, Dynastic civilization is a good thing in Creation. There is a difference between "The Realm is corrupt and dissolute, and its time is at hand to make way for something better" and "Everyone should go back to living in caves, wiping their asses with their hands, and warring with their neighbors over basic necessities because CIVILIZATION MAKES YOU WEAK".
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May 31, 2013 04:01
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Ferrinus posted:Manses are big deals. They always mean that someone took a demesne - a landscape naturally suffused with excess essence of some aspect, such that it's extra-magical in a way that's probably totally unique - and performed a huge landscaping/architecture project to channel all that essence into a single building which, itself, channels all that essence into a single hearthstone. I know later supplements added lots of rules for extra side things that you could use a manse's power to do, like magical traps or whatever, but the primary goal of a manse is to take the magical power of an entire region and congeal it into a token that you, an exalt, can exploit. That's not the sort of thing you find in every town square - an exalt is lucky to have a manse, unless they're a working Sidereal or otherwise bolstered by an extensive and influential support structure. Not necessarily. Manses aren't just siphons that take all the power in the area and concentrate it into a single spot, any more than a wind farm means there's no more wind anywhere else in the region. It's wholly possible to build a manse that exists in harmony with the demesne - seeding a mandala of lilies in an enchanted pond, whose central bloom opens to reveal the hearthstone; hanging wind chimes in a valley of echoes, whose notes play the stone into existence; cordoning off a dark forest full of terrible beasts, turning it into a game preserve where one who would attune to the manse must hunt one of the monsters within, and the hearthstone-bearer him/herself must slay the most vicious creature there and pull the gem from its bleeding heart. To the extent that a manse DOES make its demesne less magical, remember that mortals (NOT Exalts) originally raised manses not because they wanted hearthstones (most early manses didn't even generate them), but to stem the tide of unnatural horrors and mystical catastrophes that periodically spilled forth. Uncapped demesnes are pretty much radioactive.
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Jun 1, 2013 01:29
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pospysyl posted:It's not that manses make demesnes less magical, it's that they irrevocably alter the powerful essence flows that influence that demesne. For instance, when building a water manse, you're going to have to alter the flow of that magical river, or maybe even dam it up. The people downriver who age much slower thanks to their magical drinking water are slowly going to die because you wanted a hearthstone. Your disruption of earth essence might trigger earthquakes somewhere else. The manse and hearthstone section of Oadenol's Codex was great in this regard, exposing the sheer scale of what geomancy actually is. It is, however, possible to engineer a manse such that it does not irrevocably gently caress up the ecosystem it was sustaining or whatnot because human artifice is not invariably malign because this is not Captain Planet.
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Jun 1, 2013 01:51
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Kai Tave posted:Seriously, one of the more tedious ideas that seems to have crept into Exalted since I was last involved in it is the idea that "Exalted irrevocably gently caress everything up forever and are also huge assholes, just don't touch anything in case you ruin in with your big clumsy fingers you rear end in a top hat." Yeah, it's this sort of writing that made the Thousand Streams River seem reasonable when taken at face value. Let's have more consequences flowing organically from your actions and less inherent defeatism, please.
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Jun 1, 2013 02:23
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Son, let me tell you a story about a certain goose...
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Jun 1, 2013 02:56
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Mantis Style. Disarm, cripple, then hammer the crap out of them every time they try to feebly poke at you. What's not to like? Edit: Okay, if the revised DPC lets you literally be Lisa Lisa then I can live with that instead. Thesaurasaurus fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jun 2, 2013 |
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Jun 2, 2013 02:59
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Righteous Devil, Tiger, Snake, Ebon Shadow, Black Claw, Crane, and Silver-Voiced Nightingale.
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Jun 2, 2013 03:04
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taichara posted:Maybe it's because of a complete ignorance of Promethean (I don't play NWoD), but Liminals put me in mind of somehow-living versions of nemessaries. It's probably the notion of upgrading and swapping out body parts that's doing it. All I can think of now is a munchkin Liminal who takes all the best parts from the best person in every field and winds up horribly mismatched like a grotesquely-overoptimized WoW character.
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Jun 4, 2013 00:33
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Mexcillent posted:Tyrant lizard statblock didn't seem to be posted, so... It was in the old thread. The bit about "10 Strength" in its damage entries made me a little concerned, since it seems like 3E is continuing on with the previous two editions' paradigm of Strength being almost entirely pointless outside of meeting prereqs since weapon and charm boosts are just so much bigger while Dexterity remains the Stat of Stats.
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Jun 5, 2013 02:19
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Surprisingly Bitter posted:So does this mean that the shadow game is going to get less diverse? I sorta liked the Isle as being where you go to run a political campaign, and not a military one. I'm sure a Direction can be distinctive without containing only a single biome; if anything, that just makes it monotonous. Given their emphasis this edition on how absolutely loving huge Creation is and how much that means in terms of travel, it nicely solves the problem of "How do I change the scenery a bit without having the group uproot itself and head to the other side of the world?"
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Jun 6, 2013 22:55
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BryanChavez posted:I know that it's moved on from it, but I like the original canonical idea that everything is (eventually) doomed, heroes are deeply flawed as personalities, and fighting and winning against a dozen Brides of Ahlat is an impressive and heroic feat, even if you're a Solar. Two and three are cool, but as for everything being doomed - why? We already have Call of Chthulhu, Delta Green, Paranoia, WFRP, a half-dozen variants of WH40K RP, the Dark Sun campaign setting, World of Darkness (both Old and New), and I don't even know what else to fill all your pessimistic RP needs. Why do we need yet another setting where everything's hosed and you're just there to watch the pretty colors as the world burns?
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Jun 7, 2013 23:20
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Kickstarter finished. Final total 4,368 backers, $684,755 in pledges.
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Jun 8, 2013 17:01
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Ferrinus posted:"The GM can be a dick and take it away" has never really been a good way of balancing things. Hell, "The GM can be a dick and take it away" isn't even true for artifact weapons in Exalted. It takes one charm purchase for a Solar to be able to call their weapon reflexively from anywhere on the battlefield, and another so they can just store it in Elsewhere to render it immune to confiscation. You can't even break a Grand Daiklave without a dedicated toolset or artifact-breaking charm, many of which were errata'd to just de-attune the wielder. Even then, saying Unarmed has an advantage is false, since it takes a lot less effort to hack someone's arms off than to destroy an artifact.
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Jun 9, 2013 22:43
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Heart Attacks posted:Wasn't this like the first Charm of Violet Bier of Sorrows? Even the Sid splatbook gets in on it by making teaching Violet Bier of Sorrows to a non-Sid a crime more severe than murdering a co-worker.
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Jun 9, 2013 23:15
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The Gate posted:I think the point is that there is literally an item that was made to help bring unarmed people onto par with armed ones. Just because Exalted 2e's lovely rules writing and errata'ing ended up screwing it up doesn't mean that the intent wasn't there. You're making a huge loving deal over basically nothing, dude. They're already changing combat pretty massively as far as we can tell (taken on faith, granted, but still) so there's not much of an argument in saying that just because poo poo sucked last edition, it must still suck in 3e. It's not that it's impossible, or even terribly hard if you've got an afternoon to spend combing over rulebooks for options. Rather, it's that we'd prefer not to have that philosophy guiding game development so that someone playing an unarmed fighter has to do extra legwork to be as effective as a swordfighter.
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Jun 10, 2013 01:01
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Nightskye posted:The flavor of this feels really unappealing/gamey to me, though, and in a system where "well they're good at different things!" is the baseline, embracing unsatisfactory flavor is just another road to CharOp. I don't know, a system that rewards mixing up weapons and fighting styles to fit the situation as you go, a la the Devil May Cry games, sounds to me a lot more interesting than forcing you to focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else or suck. Edit: to summarize my thoughts into a pithy little soundbite, they are that while some degree of CharOp is unavoidable, the game shouldn't actively try to punish you for playing the character you want to play. Thesaurasaurus fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 01:16
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Ferrinus posted:Broadly, I'm against "well my special kata is as deadly as a daiklave, but also as easy to disrupt as a daiklave is to disarm" because it's basically an admission of defeat with regards to making the different combat abilities actually work differently in the game. I'm not pushing for exact, one-to-one symmetry between different combat skills, but in a system like Storyteller (or indeed in most engines that are crunchier than FATE), I'd prefer to keep parity of damage values and leave the distinction in weapon tags and the special attacks available to each weapon. Remember the Thrust tag in the 2.5 errata, where you could take a steeper DV penalty in exchange for gaining Piercing? I want to see more stuff like that, where different weapons unlock different options in combat.
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Jun 10, 2013 08:10
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With respect, "a couple tags" can make a pretty significant difference in playstyle. For instance, if a greatsword has a tag that reduces momentum buildup in exchange for doing absolutely gently caress-off damage when you do get to hit, while a dagger gives a massive boost to your effective momentum when you attack from stealth, while unarmed lets you undercut the other guy's momentum by knocking them off-balance or grappling or whatnot (seriously, let's have grapple rules that aren't just "You're grappled and you didn't put points into the relevant Attribute/Ability? GET hosed."), while brawling with a room full of loose objects makes it harder for the other guy to defend because he has no idea what you're gonna smack him with next, that's a pretty meaningful distinction. Ultimately there are going to have to be some similarities so long as any attack option has to have entries for accuracy and damage and reach and such, but having different attack types for each weapon can inject a lot of variety, and that's before getting into evocations and non-Charm MA Style Techniques. As a related aside, how would you see Archery and Thrown differentiated?
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Jun 10, 2013 19:41
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Plague of Hats posted:Neall's pretty great, but I thought he just did editing on Wulin. That's because we've all seen firsthand in the Exalted gameline what happens without quality editing.
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Jun 18, 2013 01:54
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BryanChavez posted:I feel that it was completely intentional, that they knew what sort of poo poo they were stirring, and I'm also 95% sure that Holden was (poorly and offensively) arguing for John Morke's decision. Morke has made it perfectly clear on the official Exalted forum that he likes testing people by specifically choosing which information he's going to release, so that he can watch the reaction. The Lady charms was just another example of that. I'm not sure what information he got from it, save that there aren't enough people who care to worry about their opinion, so he's just going to go on ahead with the offensive bullshit. While Holden's opinion and position changed (and re-changed, and re-changed...), I didn't see anything like that from Morke, and he's the top dog on this. Yeah, I've been wondering: do we have any reason to buy this, as opposed to calling bullshit on the puppetmaster defense? Even if it is true, why is it a defense and not juvenile asshattery?
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Sep 22, 2013 02:44
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Stallion Cabana posted:I don't want to use the WW forums because I have players in the game who frequent them, but none of them have SA accounts. In addition to this, most of them are also the people I would be relying on for balance chat, and I want to surprise them rather then sap the fun out of the game. Official news has been one big dry spell for months, why wouldn't we appreciate something new to 
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Sep 22, 2013 19:44
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Flavivirus posted:Have a preview of the simple NPC creation system: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B57iDF62OjtPVldfMl9nOGgwSzg/edit?usp=sharing Things that stand out to me:
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Oct 24, 2013 22:06
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Honestly, it's getting to the point where I wonder if they're actually anywhere near as far along as they're saying. I mean, that charm mentioned in the QC preview referenced an Onslaught Penalty. Weren't those supposed to be going away, what with all that multiattacks hosed combat balance in earlier editions?
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Oct 29, 2013 05:49
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Mexcillent posted:"Let me reiterate my hook and sinker belief in this marketing plan and brand, then continue to demand that all companies and endeavors follow the same marketing plan." It's a fairly well-tested model, insofar as this industry has such a thing, and it would do a lot to counter the ill will the May 27/29 updates garnered and keep the playerbase from becoming increasingly insular and creep-tastic.
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Oct 29, 2013 20:16
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Mexcillent posted:It's a marketing model, that's certainly true. Right, they're ignoring our feedback and paying (some) attention to the White Wolf Official Forums and RPGnet. I'm saying they've got it backwards, if their goal is making a clean break from the crass, juvenile poo poo.
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Oct 29, 2013 20:26
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Mexcillent posted:Yeah, but here you have all the dudes ennobling a marketing strategy as great. I'm not talking about stress-testing the edge cases, I'm talking about glaring faults such as XP that can only go towards Martial Arts, or using Martial Arts to refer to half a skill, a subsystem, a body of combat styles, and charm groupings, or chargen that doesn't even try for XP parity. Also, if every element of the system is so tightly cross-linked to the others that no individual piece can stand up to scrutiny on its own, that in and of itself is cause for concern.
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Oct 29, 2013 20:48
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Holden's essay came across as well-meant but ill-informed. Honestly, the bolded part in this:Stephenls posted:Well, the Mayan's certainly aren't known for metallurgy, although this is mostly because they're known very badly by a populace that only has a slightly more sophisticated view of other cultures than the British Empire did. I think paragraphs 11 and 12 are illustrative of why Holden doesn't have his head completely up his rear end here -- in 11, he pretty much acknowledges that "barbarian" is a wildly abused term to refer to anything the current empire is extracting slaves from (or anyone who normally wear clothes that kinda look like the clothes worn by anything the current empire is extracting slaves from), and then in 12 he says if you want to use it to have any meaning at all you need to find a subset of that larger category with some common traits, which in this case is nomadic or border cultures, i.e. not the Inca because they were neither. Those two paragraphs taken together in the context of the Inca basically go "The Inca are a group that has historically been associated with barbarism by the sort of folks who like to throw the word around, but that's kinda dumb and they really aren't even if we assume barbarians are a thing." kinda makes me wonder if 'barbarism' should be a thing, outside of in-universe screeds and slurs meant to explain why it's totally okay for you to kill or enslave your neighbors and take their stuff but morally wrong when they do it to you. I mean, it feels like the defined cultural sources are rich enough that an 'Other' category isn't really needed, or even helpful. If the goal is to tell the stories of marginalized peoples, then tell the stories of marginalized peoples, not the stories of some romanticized caricatures. Exalted is actually normally pretty good about this...except, for some reason, when Lunars get involved. For all that Conan-esque savage fantasy got talked up as a reason for this decision, the fact remains that a lot of material by Howard and his contemporaries was racist as poo poo. Even disregarding that, vast chunks of Creation are supposed to fall under the heading of savage fantasy, enough that making it the bailiwick of a single splat seems redundant. Casting off the yoke of imperialism and leading your people to glory comes up so often in Solar stories that I wonder how Lunars are supposed to pull it off without it turning into yet another instance of "why are you trying to do this thing that a Solar would do much better?" Oh, and as for the official forums, they could really benefit from getting moderated early and often, instead of threads being allowed to derail that far in the first place before getting locked. It'd also help to partition it into more specific subforums, which if nothing else will let you quarantine the assholes and white noise low-effort posts. It's why we have GBS!
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Nov 2, 2013 23:26
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I've said it before (albeit in IRC, where most of you are unlikely to have seen it, and not here) and I'll say it again: how hard would it be to provide a few standard templates for chargen? IE specialty-focused Expert, broadly-competent Generalist, stuff-oriented Noble, technique-oriented Ascetic - a group of builds that can be summarized in a page or two, and all XP-equivalent in play - then add a sidebar with an under-the-hood look at the number-crunching for people more acquainted with the system. Finally, people could see a •• on their starting sheet without feeling like they've hosed up somewhere.
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Nov 7, 2013 21:49
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Bigup DJ posted:This is really cool! The question then is what to do with the Dawn Caste - could you just say they're really good at tactics, logistics, training and so on and leave it at that, or should they be better at kung fu than the others? The 2.5 Dawn Solution sooooorta did this with the Martial/Martial-Ready keywords and Dawn King's Strife, where you could hang the Excellency dicecaps for all Dawn Abilities off of your War rating, but you ask a good question because this kind of set Dawns head and shoulder above other Solars for both straight-up shitwrecking AND everything else related to fighting. The answer to "You only really need one attack skill" was to make them good at all of them - don't get me wrong, it's pretty awesome to be able to do Dante without sinking every last XP you have into it, but it only makes the issue of Caste-based pigeonholing worse. On the broader subject of chargen disparity, the real issue is that it's just no fun to realize you've permanently cheated yourself out of (effectively) triple-digit XPs, and even more obnoxious that the 'winning move' is to hold off on the stuff you actually want so that you can get all the stuff you will eventually need right now and not suffer down the line. And like Ferrinus says, putting one player waaaaaay further ahead/behind on their wishlist than another is just irritating. Say you have two combat-focused characters (ignoring the question of "Should We All Be Kung-Fu Fighting?" for a second), and you're both playing it as a friendly rivalry. It's more than a little obnoxious for both parties to know that they'll have to abstract and handwave everything because if they get dice involved one of them will effortlessly roll the other! They weren't even trying to be That Guy, they're just good at math and reading comprehension and did what they saw as the sensible thing!
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Nov 8, 2013 04:43
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Ferrinus posted:The BP/XP system isn't actually fast and easy, unless you're a really strange person with an extremely specific temperament and set of goals - you really hate arithmetic, but you really love extremely lopsided and min/maxed stats, but you really hate planning for the future OR don't care whatsoever about your character's future stats, etc. ...this would actually explain a lot of what we see in grognards.txt. "I don't care about what we're actually doing in play, you storygaming Swine! All that matters is that I made The Best Character! I WIN!"
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Nov 8, 2013 05:34
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Lymond posted:On the subject of holdovers from previous editions, have we heard anything about the Virtues for Exalted 3? Temperance has always seemed like a poor choice. It doesn't create interesting roleplaying opportunities: a character with high Temperance rejects choices that go against his principles and might cause him trouble. You face a moral quandary and you exert self-control: no drunken brawls or unwise affairs to mess up your life. Or redefine its scope to include more interesting forms of patience, such as ambushes, Machiavellian schemes, and other things that amount to not jumping the gun. Move the 'principles' part over to Conviction, which really needs to be more than just how much of an rear end in a top hat you can be when you don't get your way, and let Temperance be about self-control instead of a monolithic compulsion to always be boring.
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Nov 8, 2013 06:24
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Ferrinus posted:Kiiiinda, but in general the World of Darkness is interesting enough, and its monsters smart/humanlike enough, that it doesn't actually rely on people deciding to split up while being hunted by the serial killer or whatever to work. You end up with a mirror of 90s-style "spend an experience point right now for a temporary bonus" rules, where you have to choose between your character's current success or future development. The fact that there's a cap on how much XP you can harvest from getting owned per scene means this is mostly manageable, but it's still a conspicuously empty check box in your quest log that blinks alarmingly at you if the scene's drawing to a close without it having been filled. I am firmly of the opinion that if you can't make a plot work unless one or more PCs suddenly lose about fifty points of IQ, it is a bad plot. I said this before on the WW forums, but if you, as a GM, really must game out a tragedy, uncertainty and tough choices are far better instigators than random acts of self-destruction.
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Nov 8, 2013 21:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I played in a game with mostly flat XP costs and XP instead of BP. It's so much better. The only issue is how you handle Essence, which is a problem, because banking most of your character's power level on something you can buy with XP has always been a lovely problem with most of White Wolf's output. Personally, I'd suggest making it like Power Level from Mutants & Masterminds, where Essence is something you increase at a set time for the whole group either based on when it would be thematically or logically appropriate, instead of making people invest XP in order to overcome requirements to be allowed to invest more XP. Evader posted:Hmm. I just make all Essence boosts above 3 plot-based awards instead of an XP-investment. Really, considering how drastically things change up at that level, it's easier on the ST if they have some clue about what powers PCs will have for encounter scaling, and easier on the other players since Essence is such a huge deal and not having to plan all your buys around when you'll go 3->4 or 4->5 is a big load off your mind.
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Nov 8, 2013 23:42
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I don't think the kind of tasteless stuff we've been discussing has some measurable impact on actual instances of sexual assault - I could be wrong, but I'd be very surprised. What it does, though, is create a very unwelcome climate in the hobby for people like your friend, and for women/minorities in general. Even when they can get past that to see how much fun can be had with elfgames, it's still a barrier to overcome, and it reinforces the toxic, insular, boys'-club-no-girls-allowed attitudes so sadly prevalent in the playerbase at large (and this isn't really arguable - I'm pretty sure the collected grogs.txt dumps would cross the line from 'anecdotes' to 'data' by now).Stephenls posted:Am I really doing so badly? Nah, you're fine. Even when I disagree with your position, you explain your reasons well, and are quite consistent about them. This puts you at least one up on Holden, who seemed to forget that people could cross-check things he'd said in different places ("It's mean but it's not rape"/"It's totally rape by impaired judgment"; "I'm sorry for all my defensive flailing"/"I didn't apologize for poo poo")
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Nov 15, 2013 22:01
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Stephenls posted:Once you introduce nerds to the idea that a particular category of things is rife with special cases, they're positively eager to demonstrate their nerdy superiority by memorizing all the exceptions. If we had three or four skills that were as unusual in structure as MA, I'd worry; as it is we're fine. No, don't feed the System Mastery geeks. Even if it didn't enable their addiction, now the rest of us have to suffer them.
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Nov 16, 2013 00:50
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We're making an effort to revive #AllUnderHeaven on SynIRC. Having more folks in there would be welcome - come on in, let's all talk about our pretend anime/pulp/wuxia superheroes!
Thesaurasaurus fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 14:48
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bartkusa posted:Can someone explain why Sijan is cool or makes sense? They deal extensively in postmortem funeral arrangements. Not postmortem funerals, which are, barring shenanigans, a tautology - they will actually use thaumaturgy to hold seances and ask ghosts how they would like their remains tended and their last wills and testaments executed. This, in a setting where the default treatment of anything supernatural that isn't part of the existing power structure is "Punch it in the face until it shuts up and falls in line." For ghosts, 'falling in line' means reincarnating regardless of unfinished business or the fact that the Immaculate promise of being born into a higher station in the next life for living humbly and virtuously in your current one is unadulterated bullshit. Sijan is awesome.
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Jan 30, 2014 21:59
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Stephenls posted:The elder Lunars are a decent pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen; if we threw them out we'd just have to come up with another pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen to replace them with, and if we specifically set out to make a pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen who fulfill the same narrative purpose as the existing ones, but in a cooler way, it would take a lot of iterating before they stopped being Poochy -- the same amount of iteration applied to Lilith, Raksi, Ma-Ha-Suchi, Leviathan, Ka-Koshu, and Tamuz can turn them much cooler characters than the hypothetical new guys would be by that point. And hell, like Chejop they're supposed to be background elements anyway; conspicuous coolness and the sort of focus necessary to make that conspicuous coolness clear draws too much reader attention. Yeah, but is there anything more to them then that? Ancient god-monster boogeymen are cool and all, but they're not just that - they're also the most prominent extant examples of a PC splat, and, at least in 2E, defined the upper bound on Lunar competence. Like, if a Lunar PC lives through all the Wyld Hunts and Sidereal death-squads and internecine strife within the Pact and innumerable other horrors of Creation, congratulations: this is what you have to look forward to. If you don't care for this, you can also be a real protagonist's pet! (Said protagonist may or may not be an NPC, or even have any relevance to the campaign). If neither of these appeal to you, you can...uhhh...hey, Boris Vallejo did some pretty sweet artwork, right? I mean if they're supposed to be a bunch of incorrigible asshats, then you could still make a kickass campaign out of hunting them down and eating them for their powers, a la Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, but if you can spare some depth and nuance for the Deebs and the Sids and even the freaking Deathlords then come onnnnn.
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Feb 16, 2014 21:23
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Stephenls posted:I think we must be working from a different set of assumptions; at no point does it occur to me not to attempt to inject depth and nuance into a pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen. I keep getting tripped up by things like "I have to explicitly state that we don't intend to make these guys 2-dimensional villains only good for hunting down and killing." Stephenls posted:Not to be your friends and support network, for starters. Certainly not to be role-models for ethical conduct. See, I'm having trouble reconciling these two statements because it sure does sound like Creation would be categorically better off without them, and I was given to understand that even the most optimistic and idealistic campaigns would, by necessity, involve putting some of the old guard up against a wall because they're a bunch of awful old reactionary fuckers who do far more harm than good. Baba Yaga gets points for being stylish as all gently caress, but if I recall correctly, the main reason nobody killed her was because they couldn't - depending on which version of the folklore you go by, she was the daughter of Mother Russia itself, and flatly could not die so long as Russia stood. This is rather less of a consideration in Exalted, where one of the fundamental premises is that there is nothing you cannot kill if you really put your mind to it. Also, from the bolded portion, I take it that there'll be a lot more distinction between the Silver Pact (assuming it still exists, as such) and the crazy elders' pet agendas? Because "friends and support network" seemed like the whole drat point of the Pact, at least insofar as PCs would care about it. Stephenls posted:Anyone else want to try tackling the problem that would result from every published NPC being a great person who you want to put in the foreground and spend time with? I have to go shopping. I'm not asking for paragons of secular humanism here, just people where you'd feel at least a little conflicted about plotting their eventual murder. I mean when we hear that Lookshy and Skullstone are the lynchpins of resistance against Realm subjugation in the Hundred Kingdoms and the West, respectively, it makes me wonder what the hell the Lunars have even been doing this whole time.
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Feb 17, 2014 02:04
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Stephenls posted:And we're right back to "But if past a certain point, size gain does have a mechanical effect, shouldn't we write the Charm so that flavor size increase from buying it isn't going to accidentally run up against that mechanical size threshold?" And then we need to establish an upper limit, and... how do we do that? And then I wrote almost 800 words. Yeah, but is the size threshold abstracted or scaled to hard ranges of h/w/d and mass the way GURPS does it? If it's the former, it'd probably help to have a general shorthand or keyword for when a charm's FX are cosmetic or, at most, there to sceneset for stunting; if it's the latter then someone probably needs to take a step back and rethink priorities, because they're not gonna out-GURPS GURPS and despite the 'U' for Universal in the name, the system's really at its best for gritty simulationism that doesn't always mesh well with heroic/mythic fantasy. Admittedly, if it's a known effect of the charm (insofar as charms exist independently of the game engine in 3E), it might help if PCs or NPCs could run into a wolf with teeth like spearpoints that can outpace the wind and immediately guess "Okay, this thing is probably friends with something divine and powerful and ganking it out of hand would be A Bad Idea," but that seems like the sort of thing that's better handled in setting material to avoid twisting the fluff and the crunch together into a Mobius strip the way 2E did.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:41
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