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Tasoth posted:The Technocracy. And this, I think, is one of the reasons that the Guide to the Technocracy was such a good book. Unlike the previous convention guides, it transformed the "I didn't understand 1984!" style mustache twirlers who wanted to crush all dreams and hopes and creativeness into a group of (mostly) well-meaning people who were terrified by the Randian psychos who thought it would be alright to reshape the world into a brutal nightmare and undo things like preventative medicine and hygiene in favor of whatever they feel like at the moment. Sure, your bosses are jerks, and some of the people on your side are fascist assholes, and some of those Iteration-X guys are pretty creepy, and those Progenitors clones are downright weird, and the Void Engineer guys who spend too much time in space tend to come back wrong, and the Syndicate guys keep falling to the Wyrm, and the NWO guys were cooler when Hulk Hogan was their leader... but, you know, they kept Ravnos from killing most of India, and have dropped infant mortality rates to almost nothing, and have finagled it so countries with McDonalds in them don't go to war with one another. That's progress, ain't it? A good villain can be seen as right. You can understand their point of view, and why they are they way they are. The best villains are right. 
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Jan 9, 2014 20:32
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Davin Valkri posted:It sounds like White Wolf's Mage series is like the Gumshoe book The Esoterrorists...told from the POV of the Esoterrorists? It is.  If I wanted to give Mage a lot of credit, the fact that each tradition book is written from a completely biased point of view is one of the major attractions and themes of the game. Consensual reality meaning that of course the group would only see things from their perspective, and would be attempting to shoehorn in "their version" of history as the real one. Unfortunately, in practice, this meant that they tended to be really hit and miss when it came to actual writing, with a lot of really naive and racist implications that just don't seem to have been fully thought out by the writers. The Dreamspeakers book, for example, presupposes that all the Native Americans want is a return to the primitive lives of their ancestors, rather than, you know, fulfilling careers and safety and financial security. Any of the very real tensions that exist in the community (and, seriously, this is a huge issue both generationally and historically within the community, with a vast range of opinions on all sides that need to take into account the very different circumstances that different people live in) are pretty much ignored in favor of a media friendly "urban shaman" type thing and any dissension is blamed squarely on the Technocracy, because why else would a Native American not want to live freely on the plains, hunting elk with a spear, running with the spirits and living in the communal dreamtime alongside the gods? There's enough detail in the book to show that it is clearly a topic the author cares about, and did put a lot of work into, but not to the point of analyzing the modern community itself in a deep enough way. And so it comes off really, really bad. edit: deadly_pudding posted:Needs to be Mage canon. Just keep it all the same, except NWO is a bunch of edgy heel wrestlers in matching t-shirts. The players who don't get super mad and walk out as soon as Hollywood Hogan emerges from the black helicopter are the players you want to keep around This would be the best Mage game ever. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jan 9, 2014 |
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Jan 9, 2014 21:14
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citybeatnik posted:The Revised Son of Ether book is easily one of my favorite splat books (up there with the Revised Bone Gnawers Tribebook), and I think that part of that is the ton of work that went in to it, the book not really shying away from going "oh yeah, the Victorian Era Etherites were hilariously racist and would steal credit for stuff their non-European students would do", and a potentially throw away line concerning why Etherites tend to dress like something out of a silly pulp novel - it's their giant middle finger to the baked-in cynicism of the WoD itself. That sounds awesome! I'll need to give the revised books a look. I could never find paper copies back when they first came out, so all my impressions are based on the originals. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Jan 9, 2014 |
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Jan 9, 2014 22:53
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Calde posted:I have a strange relationship with old Mage nowadays. As a kid that stuff all made sense to me, the whole "Tradtions are good, Technocracy are evil" angle... but looking back I just cannot find the Traditions sympathetic. The Virtual Adepts still own, though. Then again, in oWoD they'd be responsible for bitcoins. Damnit. Same here. It fostered a lot of my early interest in philosophy, got me to read a lot of books I wouldn't have otherwise touched, and and taught me a ton about relativism and perspective. Now that I'm not in high school anymore and have a philosophy degree and actually work with disadvantaged groups on a daily basis, so much of it just either rings false, or I can successfully argue against to my satisfaction. I guess that makes me part of the duped technocratic masses, forever corrupted and banal, unable to see the bright dreams of awesome mages lording their powers over the unwashed?  I absolutely agree with the idea that nWoD is what happened when all the "Never Trust Anyone Over 30" oWoD writers suddenly found themselves in their mid-30s and that the world wasn't anything like the gothic/cyber-punk dream we'd been promised in the 90s.
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Jan 11, 2014 19:23
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Cardiovorax posted:Now that's just sad. I wonder how many people who didn't get a philosophy degree got stuck at that point? Well, when you're 14 and already reading Plato thanks to a philosophy course at your high school, and the Illuminatus Trilogy and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and similar books thanks to the internet, and it turns out that there's a cool version of D&D set in the real world with vampires and werewolves and swearing and trenchcoats, and then it turns out that the game for playing wizards is based on the books you're reading and has, no poo poo, bibliographies in the front to check out! And then huh, a lot of this stuff doesn't follow at all. Why doesn't there...? No, no. It's published, it'll all make sense. Check their sources again. This RPG book was expensive, and written by professional writers. I must be the one making a mistake.    Yeah... I didn't have a lot of friends as a kid. I probably would have ended up majoring in philosophy anyways, but Mage didn't exactly help me out of a situation I was already mired in. Better to get a lot of it out of your system when you're in high school and everyone expects you to be a dramatic and confused idiot who doesn't understand anything.
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Jan 12, 2014 07:07
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Kurieg posted:I don't know, there's a lot of oChangeling players who absolutely hate nChangeling. Because to them oChangeling is already a plenty dark game because it's about the death of childhood. Which is the worst thing ever. Well, does seem like a pretty direct shot across the bow when the old line that was about how great playing make believe is, and how the realm of dreams is this bright and wonderful place that is slowly and inevitably crushed to death under the horrors of growing up and the "real" world and its banal explanations for everything, this old game is replaced with a new one about how all that childish wonder and merriment is a cheap disguise for horrible abuse and psychological damage and a crippling inability to fit into the real world, leaving its victims forever caught between the make believe world they now see for the damaged horror that it is, and the old lives they can never fit back into. You could probably write an entire psychology paper about player's various reactions to it. nChangeling, more so than any of the other nWoD games, emphasizes just how hosed it is to, say, spend your entire childhood and teenage pretending to be someone else and then find yourself in your 30s with no job and no friends outside your hobby, and that a balance between make believe and reality needs to be struck is exactly what the extreme elements of the now former target audience wanted to hear. Many posters, our reviewer for F&F included, made the point that nChangling is all about survivors of child abuse banding together to cope, and most people's thoughts immediately and rightly go to Mommy Dearest style torment. But a perfect prelude for a nChangling character could also be the FFVII House... Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Jan 13, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 06:33
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GimpInBlack posted:So give me your concepts for characters recruited into a weird, secretive, privately-wealthy paranormal investigation society. Remember that everybody recruited into the Society has a psychic power of some kind. Powers, like most of character creation, are pretty freeform, but to fit with the game's mythology they should generally be related to space and/or time (e.g. remote viewing or precognition moreso than telekinesis or mind control). Or you can leave your concept's power unknown and I'll pick something interesting. If I get enough concepts, I'll make an entire Seven Dogs Society! Alright, to add some dynamic tension to the group... A reclusive, intellectual, and heavily bearded English comic book writer who still uses an old typewriter for all his scripts, claims to be a magician, and worships a sock puppet he knows to be a completely false and invented god. In keeping with his reclusive tendencies, he can turn invisible, or otherwise cloud him presence from the minds of others.
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Jan 13, 2014 06:50
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Vienna Circlejerk posted:Name the kith that is totally awesome and if you really were that it would be so cool. "Pooka. Err, wait, no, we're supposed to lie all the time, so, uhm, Redcaps!" Which, honestly, you're only a couple steps away from were-whatever anyways...
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Jan 17, 2014 04:05
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Halloween Jack posted:To be fair to William Gibson, I don't think that's William Gibson's cyberpunk either. I'm not a scholar of the genre, but I believe most of the fault for people associating cyberpunk with heist plots and superpowered cyborgs falls squarely on Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, and a handful of animes. Neuromancer is basically a complicated heist novel about a computer hacker and a cyborg samurai stealing secrets from a megacorporation. It's not what the book is "about," but it's certainly the plot of the book. It's completely Gibson's fault that everyone is imitating what he wrote.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:22
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Halloween Jack posted:Ah, yes, Neuromancer. The only novel William Gibson ever wrote. It's the only one that the author of most cyberpunk fiction seem to have read Not that the other Sprawl stories and novels don't have similar plots...Or are we going to get really silly and claim that most of his books aren't about corporate espionage of one sort or another? edit: to put it another way, it's Gibson's fault that cyberpunk is mostly cyborg-computer hacker heists with splashes of epistemology in the same way that it's Tolkien's fault that most fantasy novels involve Long Journeys to defeat Dark Lords and/or dispose of Powerful Magic Objects. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jan 29, 2014 |
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Jan 29, 2014 16:48
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What we're trying to say here is please, educate us! This game looks pretty cool! I'm always a sucker for settings that seem familiar on the surface (the part about settlers coming from Europe and killing all the Indians and taking over the land), but are based on cultures I don't know much about and have circumstances completely different from the way that story happened in North America.
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Feb 5, 2014 00:01
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 Rolemaster: Part 4 - Combat! Starring Rick Jason and Vic Morrow. First off, let’s start this off right, with more 80s metal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4qTi7cDtI4 Yeah! That’s chart referencing and percentage calculating music! Now, combat in Rolemaster is either pretty straightforward, or the worst joke you’ve ever heard about how stupidly specific D&D gets with its charts. Don’t believe me? Here’s a guide to calculating how different sub-use scabbard materials and placement affects your initiative when drawing your sword, and how to calculate the cost of a multipurpose sheath:  A shovel sheath cannot be made of anything but stone! So sayeth the ICE gods! You can’t make this poo poo up! See, the simulationist lords at ICE had a very bad habit of simply publishing anything and everything that was sent to them with only the most cursory glance as to whether it was something anyone would ever need, let alone whether or not it affected game balance, simply labeling just about everything in the game “optional” and leaving it up to the GM to make calls as to what did and didn’t fly in their games. IYears before White Wolf started published books that were chockful of “secret and mysterious” clans and sects that you would never, ever get to play despite having full rules and write ups for them, Rolemaster was leading the charge! It helped insure that if you played at two different tables playing Rolemaster, you had no idea what the game would actually be like! The later books started including checklists in the back so you could keep track of which optional rules you were using, and which ones they recommended you actually use. But if you can think of it, there’s probably a rule or a chart for it somewhere. But, by ignoring all that optional crap, you have a combat system that runs pretty smoothly once everyone gets the hang of it, and does a very nice job of being more “realistic” than D&D without going full on FATAL with nonsense about HP for individual limbs and such. Combat is divided into 4 broad phases: 1. Magic 2. Missile 3. Movement 4. Melee Everyone acts at the same time, and initiative is only rolled if there is a dispute. This is a rule I dig because it prevents the “everyone sits around while Jimmy is an indecisive waffle about which of the three orcs he wants to hit” that the turn by turn initiative systems most games from this period have. While Jim overthinks, we can resolve the other people at the table who know what they want to do. The phases are technically a little more complicated than that, with, for example, the magic phase broken up by the Spell Action phase and Spell Results phase and Spell Orientation phase all being rolled up into one phase up above because it so rarely comes up that they aren’t all one unit that it doesn’t really matter.  The fancy dan overly complicated version The phases are pretty self explanatory: magic is cast in the spell phase, missile weapons are fired in the missile phase, etc. You can take an “opportunity action” to go take the action of an earlier phase in a later one (if you want to move to a different position before you use your bow, for example), but you cannot jump ahead. Melee tends to be the only one that gets a lot of initiative rolls, which are a d100 + your Quickness bonus, but occasionally missile will get them as well for sniper duels and such. Each action a character takes during a round takes a various percentage, with the lowest at 10% being things like “casting your first instant spell this round” and “Moving at a slow walk (1/2 base rate)”, and the largest at 90% being things like “performing multiple martial arts attacks” “reloading a crossbow” and “Sprinting at x4 base movement”. For the most part, you won’t end up using the whole 100%, unless you’ve got a spell or a magic item like Haste or Speed which doubles your actions, and will allow you to make multiple attacks (which are 70%). The rough version is you’ve got enough to move your regular speed (20%), make an attack or begin casting a non-instant spell (70%), and 10% left over for talking or signaling to other PCs. These action percentages are difficult as hell to find, spread throughout multiple books. I was lucky enough to have a GM who compiled them all into a handout for us, otherwise it’d be hell. The game doesn’t come out and say it, but you’re going to use a hex grid with 5 or 10 foot hexes, and miniatures. Combat is crunchy enough about ranges, flanking, and other tactical considerations that Theatre of the Mind play would be pretty darn tricky. In fact, I’d say that Rolemaster is about as close to a computer game as you’re going to get without an actual computer. More on this in a moment. There are four important statistics for each combatant during combat, their Offensive Bonus (OB) and their Defensive Bonus (DB), which determine hits and misses, their Hit Points, which you already know about because this isn’t your first rodeo, and their Armor Type, which is an interesting variation on armor class that I haven’t seen in any other games. Rather than have armor work as a combined “luck + hits that don’t hurt + divine grace + rolling with the hit” thing like D&D, what Armor Type you are in explicitly effects what amount of damage each type of weapon does to you and what kind of criticals will be inflicted. As you’ll see in a moment, the heavier armors result in you getting hit more often, but with far fewer criticals being inflicted, and that it’s way better to wear almost nothing if you’re not going to wear AT9 or higher. This is an interesting way to represent the protective capabilities of armor, and not a completely inaccurate one; heavier armor can be bulkier, but the mail and plate take most of the hit for you, while bare skin just gets torn to shreds. As a house rule, we play that the Plate base armors drop criticals one severity, because the maneuver penalties they inflict are so severe and not exactly based in reality (the game for all its vaunted research being made in the 80s, back before a lot of proper study was done into the actual wearing of armor for practical use) that otherwise it’s overall better to wear a Teddy Roosevelt style AT12 leather hunting suit than a suit of plate mail. Cool as that suit is, sometimes you want to play a knight in shining armor, and giving them a tankier bonus seemed a good way to cut the difference.    Because there are only 4 important numbers, this makes the GMs job pretty easy, as you can just make a column with the various numbers for each monster, noting which type of weapon each OB is for and which type of critical is inflicts (more on this in a moment), a couple notes about what the thing is carrying and if it has any magical spells, and you’re all done.  Sample bad guy entries from Rolemaster Companion VII To calculate the Player’s OB, you take the total of their relevant weapon or martial arts skill, add in any bonuses from magical weapons or ammunition, backgrounds, circumstances, etc. To calculate the Player’s DB, you take their quickness bonus, add any relevant magical items or backgrounds, and any ranks they might have in the (usually obscenely expensive) skill Adrenal Dodge. You also get a +10 to +30 bonus if you are carrying a shield, depending on the shield. What this means is that while people’s OB quickly skyrockets, the DBs are usually quite low. This is because, simulationists that they are, ICE isn’t really in favor of people being innately superfast and unhittable. This is where Parrying comes in. You are allowed to sack part of your OB and apply it to your DB, to represent actively defending yourself against an attacker. Thankfully, you are always allowed to declare a parry regardless of how well you did on initative in the melee phase, though if you parry with 50% or more of your OB, you automatically secede initative to your opponent. You can also do a “full parry” and apply your entire OB to your DB, if you’re nervous about the enemy attacking you. Against bows, well, you’re hosed. Better hope there’s a mage in range with an Aim Untrue, or that you can get your hands on a magical item that casts it quickly. To make an attack, the attacker rolls a d100, adds it to their OB, and tells the GM. The GM then adds in any modifiers for positioning (you get a bonus for a back attack, for example), subtracts the defenders DB from the number, and consults the weapon’s chart. Each weapon has a big chart that looks like this:  Only complicated til you know how to read it You slide across the top to find what armor type the defender is in, then slide downwards to find the result of the attacker’s OB minus the defender’s DB just calculated a moment ago. The number there is how much “concussion damage” is given as a result of the strike, hit point damage. The two letter code, if present, is the critical severity (first letter) and its type (second letter). The critical severity range from A-E, with A being the weakest and E the most lethal. The most common types of criticals are Slashes (S), Pierces (P), and Krushes (K, so used to distinguish them from the C severity). The player rolls on the critical chart to determine the fate of the foe, or vice versa. This is Rolemaster’s claim to fame, and ICE’s famous tag line “The Inventors of the Critical Hit”. Arms Law/Claw Law actually came out years before Rolemaster did, and was intended as an add on supplement to AD&D or any other roleplaying game system that wanted a more “realistic” combat system. And since when you get hit with a sword, you get cut in the arm and start bleeding, or you get poked in the eye and permanently lose vision on that side, rather than taking an abstract number of hits off of an abstract value representing how lucky, rough and tumble, good with armor, and divinely protected you are, this book launched a hundred crit charts depicting horrific things that occurred to you if the DM rolled a natural 20. In Rolemaster, though, the crits are on a sliding scale, as we mentioned above, and aren’t all instant death and disfigurement. Just a lot of them.  So, if our hypothetical fighter hits someone with his war mattock, which only does Krush criticals, depending on how well he hits him and how lucky he is on his critical roll, he can do anything from nothing at all, to instantly killing him. Most likely, he will do a little extra damage, stun the defender, and force them to full parry next round. But the harder he hit, the more sever the critical, and the E column is a lot deadlier than the A one is, and inflicts more severe penalties even when it doesn’t kill outright. Is this trickier than just rolling once for attack and once for damage? A little, sure. But not that much. It’s actually not all that different from the kind of thing that a computer game from the period might do, taking into account all your fiddly little bonuses and comparing them with the armor of the enemy. You might also note that the weapon chart “tops out” at 150. That’s right, there’s a bounded limit for how much you can gently caress someone up with a given weapon, even if you roll triple open ended and have a +300 skill in swords. This is because you really ought to be parrying, and because you can split your attack once you have a sufficiently high OB to do so. To split your attack, before you roll the dice, you divide the OB number, subtract 20 from each side, and make two attacks. This is silly if you only have only 100 OB, because you’ll be attacking two targets at a net of 30 ((100/2)-20=30), but not so bad if you’ve got a 300 OB and you’re fighting piddly little things ((300/2)-20=130). The game gets complicated, but it’s mostly just a bit of basic math. If you do it once or twice, you end up writing down the numbers for your common split attacks and parries, and won’t even have to touch a calculator. Now, if you play with all the optional rules, where everyone has a billion fiddly little bonuses to everything, and there are sixteen different charts you need to consult before you take any action, it becomes a horrific slog. But the worst my group has ever had was waiting a moment for the GM to pull out the radiation critical charts from a different book that he hadn’t compiled into his One Big Book of Critical Charts yet. Is this a failure of the game? Totally. As the different companions came out, the need to flip between three or four different books grew and the game got crazy. But with a little photocopying and some plastic sheets, my GM made his own books in a sensible order so he could run the game smoothly. It is of absolutely no surprise that this isn’t worth the time and effort to everyone else. But there are a lot of neat ideas and concepts that could be stolen and incorporated into other games. Next Time: Sample Combat! or, how many of those level 1 guys we made last time will survive their first encounter? Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Feb 14, 2014 |
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Feb 14, 2014 06:52
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InfiniteJesters posted:Those crit charts are like Dark Heresy's, except with all the fun and Well, they've got their own kind of charm, especially the higher and more lethal ones that insult and belittle the victim. Remember, these were written in 1979, and originally looked like this:  Which is exactly the kind of thing that a high school kid would write on a sheet of notebook paper, right down to the "extreme" jagged hand-lettered font, but then cleaned up a little by the simulationist overlords. It'd be years before 40k's grim dark awesomness would come into its own. neonchameleon posted:Bear in mind that they used an only slightly tweaked version of them for Middle Earth Roleplaying. It's one of the two biggest game/setting mismatches I'm aware of (the other being GURPS Discworld). What, you don't remember the time when Strider tore an ork in two, rendering the poor sucker's body useless because his brain was destroyed and making him expire in six agonizing rounds? or when Gandalf melted the Witch-King's lower half into a pool of fluid. Instant death! What they were trying to establish were ways for lower level, unskilled combatants to get "lucky shots" and outright kill enemies which are vastly more powerful than them. The classically cited examples are Bard Bowman in The Hobbit taking out Smaug with the Black Arrow in a single shot, and the Witch-King of Angmar falling to Merry and Éowyn, who clearly aren't level 50 Paladins like the Witch-King is, in The Return of the King. Not a bad idea in theory, because sometimes there are lucky breaks, but it really misses the points of the books (where, you know, both incidents hung on prophecies and fated meetings and general awesomeness), and is generally much like Candide's Dr. Pangloss asserting that the nose was so shaped to hold glasses. No one could manage to see this because they were too busy detailing more and more complicated charts about overly specific skills none by the most evil of GMs would ever force people to use. In practice, because most low level characters don't roll that 1 in 1000 chance for instant death against a high level monster (which usually have magic to stop a few lucky shots each turn anyways), it just makes people highly skilled and of higher level that much more deadly in combat. LotR shouldn't be Fantasy Vietnam; it would work great for a high casualty series like The Black Company or The Malazan Book of the Fallen.  Or, you could play something a lot less complicated than one of the original fantasy heartbreakers 
Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Feb 14, 2014 |
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Feb 14, 2014 19:00
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sucked out of them.
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Alien Rope Burn posted:At least it cops to that fact, after some of the books I reviewed that have multiple editors yet no actual editing. Sadly, in a lot of the publishing world "Editor" is shorthand for "Person who wants credit for involvement without doing any work" or "Idea Guy".
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Mar 19, 2014 22:36
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Gerund posted:I'll still never forget reading KJA's deep, loving appreciation of the training of storm troopers. The dipshit mooks of the sci fi canon being given the same hallowed tones reserved for the least self-aware WH40k Space Marine fan-fiction. Rand Brittain posted:I have to say, I will never stop being in love with the story of the villainous Hutt who subcontracts his superweapon to the lowest bidder and creates the crappiest doomsday device in galactic history. Well hell, I know what novel I'm writing next. Only, you know, with enough self awareness to realize exactly what I'm doing.
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Mar 27, 2014 20:00
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Halloween Jack posted:Heh. It's much more likely that it's named after Samuel Butler, a guy who wrote an extremely-ahead-of-its-time (during the Civil War) essay about the possibility of "machine life" overtaking and replacing biological life. Butler then took that essay, "Darwin among the Machines" (1863), and expanded it into an entire novel. If you're a fan of Dune, or even of science fiction in general, Erewhon is highly recommended. It's some really cutting edge poo poo for 1872. quote:Herein lies our danger. For many seem inclined to acquiesce in so dishonourable a future. They say that although man should become to the machines what the horse and dog are to us, yet that he will continue to exist, and will probably be better off in a state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than in his present wild condition. We treat our domestic animals with much kindness. We give them whatever we believe to be the best for them; and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has increased their happiness rather than detracted from it. In like manner there is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 19:40
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