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Yes! Pantheons of the Megaverse is my favorite of the "what the poo poo" brand of Rifts books. Hundred-handed one giants aren't suitable for PC status because they roll 3D6X10,000 for their MDC calculation. Okay, that seems reasonable. "But they could be suitable, if they accidentally drank a magic potion that reduced that number by half!" Oh, thanks! Thanks for that. I can't wait for my Kittani Operator to hang around with a guy that has, on average, 55,000 MDC. Other than that insanity, I don't want to spoil a thing, so I'm gonna shut up before I start talking about how insane the priest class is.
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Mar 31, 2014 18:24
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's what it was! I knew they did another pointless movie adaption RPG, but I couldn't find it anywhere. They also did an Army of Darkness game, but it was a minis skirmish game not an RPG. Man oh man, one of our earliest podcast reviews was Cinematic Unisystem junk, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. It was apparent early on that the book was going to stay in that smarmy tone of calling the reader "Slappy," and promising to fill the pages with "cool show quotes and pictures, honest."
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Apr 1, 2014 17:26
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Alien Rope Burn posted:And Buffy had CJ Carella doing a good deal of the writing, who of course was also the main writer of Pantheons of the Megaverse. Because RPGs are one big ouroboros of fandom, as it turns out. We talk about that, but I was mostly outing him as the author of Rifts: Underseas and Rifts: South America, since those go off the rails in some extremely crazy ways. To be honest, Underseas might just be my favorite Rifts book, since I love the idea of a single aircraft carrier becoming an insular post-apocalypse society. Of course it's Rifts, so you get that idea and then immediately torpedo it by making the ship a giant ultra-boat that is totally invincible so there's no perceived threats or anything. Just like a floating Chi-Town. Oh, they're lost in the wilderness, a bastion of reactionary society fighting for their very lives, with their impenetrable defenses, impregnable armor, and one million suits of power armor! Fear for them! Still though, PC whales, power armor designed to give sharks legs, and pirates that raid dreams. Best Rifts book? Maybe! I can't speak for the other guy, but as with any game that has one, my problem with Buffy was a lovely merits/flaws system. Bonus character creation if you promise to tell a lot of bad jokes! Same for if you promise not to! Plus a bunch of drawbacks that effectively constitute a game of long-form chicken with your storyteller. "Will this be the week you dump on me for my lovely flaw choices? Will this be the week that you're an rear end in a top hat DM?" type stuff.
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Apr 1, 2014 17:55
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FMguru posted:No, the worst are the ones that make the plot all about you and also give you points (hunted, enemy, intermittently possessed, etc.). Or maybe the ones that give you points but make you a burden to the party (I played a campaign with someone who was afraid of the dark and fainted at the sight of blood. A dungeon exploring & fighting campaign. That was some fun). Or the ones that give you points for stuff you were gonna be anyway (bloodthirsty, overconfident, etc.). The worst ones are all of them. Here, have a breakdown. 1. Personality trait: You act like a monkeycheese idiot all the time for the first session, then forget you had this(and keep acting like that because you're playing an RPG). 1 CP 2. Spotlight: You have an archenemy! You have a sidekick! You have a wife! Whatever you've got, it sure is extra characters you get to design and wrench the campaign towards! 3 CP 3. You make the DM be the rear end in a top hat: You're unlucky! The DM can call on you to reroll one successful roll you make per day. If he does this, he's an rear end in a top hat, so make sure to point that out! 5 CP 4. Deformity/Disability: Your choice of sexy scar or pointless bad breath (1 CP), or missing hand/leg sort of thing you'll just metagame around. (5 CP) 5. Obvious choice: Has a surprising reward to penalty ratio. Not surprisingly, everyone in the world seems to have this one (is anyone in this party NOT related to the emperor?)! 10 CP 6. Just a hook: Psychic visions, a delicate wife, a job with a mercenary company, whatever you choose, it's just you spending character points on hooks your DM was gonna have to provide anyway! 2 CP 7. Not Campaign Friendly: What do you mean my 30 foot riding chicken won't fit in the dungeon? Don't make me waste my points, Jerry! See item 3! 5 CP
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Apr 1, 2014 18:48
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Any flaw / drawback / disadvantage systems are the worst. Having played a lot of Legend of the Five Rings 4e lately, the fact that "pranked once a month by an imp" is the same as "tainted by hell and under a potential death sentence to the entire empire" is just dumb. The only ones that really work to me are narrative ones like Mutants & Masterminds or FATE, where you just grant you narrative currency (instead of character points or XP) when they come up, which self-solves the issue of flaws that never actually inconvenience you (given a good GM, anyway). Don't know if they changed it in future editions, but my favorite thing in L5Rs merit/flaw was that Scorpions got a 1 point reduction in cost for "Dirt on Someone" and the cost for "Dirt on Someone" was 1 per point of Honor. Which meant if you played a Scorpion, it was in your best interest to have dirt on every lower-class person in the Empire/World. I assume the dirt you had was just "you're poor, man." By the same token, it was a 9 point investment (not out of the realm of possibility) for a Scorpion to have some serious, arm-twist grade dirt on the Emperor. Of course the books was pretty heavily set against this, pointing out he'd just have you killed for even having the dirt, which leads me to a category I forgot. 8. Bad Benefits: You have a mentor who's too busy to see you, a kingdom that's constantly getting invaded, or a legend that only draws assassins. Otherwise known as "Just take 4 dots" thanks to this being a key feature to how dumb 1e Exalted was. Bieeardo posted:The South America books were fantastic. They were also where my group started joking about every corner of the Earth being stuffed with multidimensional empires, who couldn't expand to take over the planet with all of the other ones standing cheek by jowl with them. Loved 'em, just quietly removed the Mutant Cat civilization. I get enough drat mutant animals in every other book ever produced by Palladium. Still amazed he didn't try to shoehorn them into Robotech.
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Apr 1, 2014 19:36
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I didn't agree with a lot of your opinions from that Buffy review. The main issue is that the players and ref really need to know the game universe. If you don't, a lot of the decisions that were made seem really silly. You're right there. If they hadn't hidden them behind a wall of "promise to tell a bunch of bad jokes" stuff I would have loved it to just have an extra ten points. Overall, I think we both came out more or less liking that book, despite a few 90s-y misgivings (the art, the relentless inclusion of template PCs, the merits/flaws) and of course we didn't like the tone. I'm not a Buffyverse expert (I've been watching it and I'm up to season 4) but the other guy has seen 'em all and knows the material. The book doesn't really reflect the tone of the show, it has a sort of ... trying too hard flair. We were big fans of the simplified enemy creation system and the clever model to create a game where playing Xander wouldn't be extremely terrible.
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Apr 1, 2014 20:24
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Evil Mastermind posted:To be fair, you wouldn't think it was "trying to hard" if you'd ever read any of the West End later-day RPGs like Paranoia 5th or Men in Black. Those are games that try to hard. Gonna take that one as a challenge. Men in Black, going on the to-do list! Also drat, we hadn't figured out to do the intro and junk by episode 3. That just sounds weird to me now. Also my own voice, still totally making me shudder. theironjef fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 20:57
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:jef, I'm still trying to figure out why you guys actually like any of the Palladium games. Some variation on Stockholm Syndrome maybe? Straight up that. I didn't come to this nerdlife through D&D like a normal child ought to do. I was playing Dahmer (we're all 13 for a year) the Titan Cyberknight. There's a lot of rose-colored nostalgia for Palladium for us. What have we reviewed so far, I think just Heroes Unlimited? I figure we'll probably save Rifts (a game we both love the concept of so much that we have like 300 pages of homebrew D10 conversion stuff for it) for a milestone episode or something.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:10
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Like I said. I have an insane collection of RPGs (I've scanned a lot of them as well) and would love to guest commentate. We're working on that. I just finished moving and recently the other fella got a job in the same town as me (finally) so he'll be moving as well, so we're gearing up to expand the field a little on all the dust settles. More guest hosts and more topics.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:18
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Valatar posted:Carella was also responsible for Nightspawn, which rates pretty high on the 'things Palladium did that weren't complete poo poo' list for me. It was a somewhat blatant ripoff of a blending of 80s horror flicks to make a setting, but I think it did a much better job of the whole 'your character is a supernatural monster' thing than WoD in that there was nothing glamorous or noble about being a thing with a doll face, screaming mouths for eyes, and spider legs. poo poo was just plain creepy and hosed-up, and the world was so screwed that a party of cenobites was actually fairly believable as the good guys compared to the other things out there. Oh man I was flipping through my copy of that the other day and it was so hilarious how much I had built up the art in my head. There's a Brom piece on the cover, so that's wonderful, but some of the stuff inside... wow. One thing about that book that always intrigued me were the little light-powered aliens that shot beams. They're introduced in a short section near the back, they don't really seem to fit the gothic dark theme, and I have always wondered... what are the odds they're a late addition to the book by the Simbieda? He did always seem to have a need to add a paladin-y obvious good guy in each book (Azverkan, Cosmo-Knight, etc.).
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Apr 1, 2014 23:44
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For some reason our GM always maintained that the single power a Demigod is supposed to get is drawn from the underlined powers that gods have later in the book, which was hilariously imbalanced. I assume this is because we had a first printing, since I don't think I've ever seen that list of Godling powers before.
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Apr 2, 2014 17:47
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Here you go, goons. Episode 16 - Scion: Hero. http://systemmasterypodcast.com/2014/04/08/system-mastery-16-scion-hero/
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Apr 8, 2014 20:21
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Alien Rope Burn posted:So, in your educated opinion, which is least worser, Pantheons or Scion? Pantheons is so much more fun it's not even fair, but on the other hand I can't imagine actually using it for anything but a light bathroom read. Scion could conceivably be played as a game amongst a group of friends, but only for the first book, and well... it's just so White-Wolfy. Tough call.
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Apr 9, 2014 20:47
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Evil Mastermind posted:(Plant gods in Scion don't get anything actually useful until 4 dots, and can't do anything Poison Ivy-ish until 9 dots out of 10.) And by the time you get to 9 dots in something you have so much epic [stat] that it's all you'll need to do whatever anyway. "Make plants do a crazy thing? Sure, I have 72 autosuccesses on a Manipulation-related roll, I think I can talk a plant into whatever."
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Apr 9, 2014 21:07
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Mr. Maltose posted:Ixians are dudes from Planet Ix, who are the most advanced producers of "machine culture" and are just short of violating the ideals of the Butlerian Jihad. Not to mention they are stumpy little grey dudes with sharp teeth and elf ears.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:52
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Wapole Languray posted:Ah, sorry. I'll edit that out then. Don't feel too bad, I still have a podcast floating around where we basically guess that the guy who wrote Haven: City of Violence is a huge racist, so you're at least better than I am, morally.
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Apr 17, 2014 00:11
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Fossilized Rappy posted:This is dirt I'd love to know more on. Easy dirt: He wrote Haven: City of Violence. The game where the DM is called the G.O.D.
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Apr 17, 2014 04:15
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oriongates posted:The VR Rating is a concept introduced in order to try and set the theme of the Ninja Burger game and it refers to the Violence/Realism rating. These ratings are +2, 0, and -2 for each. Is there an associated die roll for this to explain why it's +2 and -2 instead of just +1 and -1? Does the book make mention of a Realism +1 scenario?
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Apr 17, 2014 15:18
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Oddly, this is far and away our most popular episode. More than twice as listened to as our 2nd most popular one. People are bonkers for Haven. Maybe just got linked in here more than once or something.
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Apr 18, 2014 16:40
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Halloween Jack posted:Me too, apparently! I had no idea that had been covered. I was just listening to the Haven episode of System Mastery, and it actually reminded of what I'd heard about Wraeththu. I know that sounds weird, but hear me out: In both cases, the game wasn't just about a setting, it was the author's attempt to make the best, most "realistic" and comprehensive universal system at the same time. Actually we're suffering through another one of those right now. Recording tonight. Goddamn 90s and their games that are 100 times more realistic that D&D which is for noobs and babies.
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Apr 20, 2014 18:00
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Episode 17 of System Mastery is now live. We discuss Don't Look Back: Terror is Never Far Behind. It's the weirdest resolution system I've ever seen, certainly the first one that requires the players to determine absolute values of skill rolls. Fun times. Well no. No fun times. http://systemmasterypodcast.com/2014/04/22/system-mastery-17-dont-look-back-terror-is-never-far-behind/
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Apr 23, 2014 06:16
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Alien Rope Burn posted:This is probably the worst of the fake pantheons, and a sour note to end on for the Indian pantheons... seriously, four arms, that’s all it takes?.. yeah. It’s pretty On the other hand, this is a rare occurence of new art for an old Rifts monster. I figure that the new artists hate having to look at one old lovely comic-book muscle picture with a sea urchin for a head for reference and just say "gently caress it, I'm inventing the Quick-Flex Alien." So generally, they draw one pencil piece once and then never revisit that species again, from Azverkan to Zem'bahk. Go Neuron Beasts! Maybe next week we'll see another drawing of a Witchling or a Hawrk'Duk.
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Apr 28, 2014 15:27
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Regarding the Quick-Flex, I admit that if I had a chance to make game material out of random Jim Lawson doodles, I'd totally do that, so that gets a pass as far as I'm concerned. But there's a later race that gets invented because they had art of some random D-bee by Tim Truman originally used way, way back in the original corebook, but they were never statted, so then they become an official race around forty or fifty books into the game line. Talk about scraping that barrel clean! I've always wondered if the Quick-Flex was even supposed to be a d-bee. Like I picture Simbieda (I think he's got primary credit for Coalition War Campaign) looking at a stack of Jim Lawson and Ramon Perez pieces and getting to that guy. "Huh, he's got a bunch of crosses and chains all over him, so I guess maybe he's some kind of holy man biker? Forgot to draw a nose though. I'll just add a few slits here, and boom, D-Bee!"
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Apr 28, 2014 16:14
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I dread the idea that I'll get far enough in Rifts books to cover Coalition War Campaign. I hope you do. I can't review it because 90% of the reason that book is any good is the art. It's like they just flipped through a stack of Simbieda's dream journals, opened the one titled "Summer of '95: Sixteen Stone and Downward Spiral" and started randomly assigning stats to everything in there. theironjef fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Apr 28, 2014 |
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Apr 28, 2014 16:42
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Commoners posted:I wonder why they decided to make the dire whale a whale head with shark teeth and shark fins. Even the tail is vertical instead of horizontal. Just a small detail, but that art awesome but it's a MY IMMERSSIIONNNNN thing with the whale secretly being a shark. It just has an ultra-rotatey spine as one of it's dire features. No worries. The head is rotated about 140 degrees from the pectoral fins and then another 90 from there to the dorsal. Alien Rope Burn posted:77K / 15K MDC, can "see up to 20 miles" (too bad the horizon blocks sight after about 2-3 miles? This is literally just a limitation. This guy can't see most of the sky. If he's standing on a hotel balcony near the beach he can see about 70% of the ocean view we could see and then I guess it just terminates? Heck, none of us can really see any distance, since what we're really seeing is just light arriving from a near limitless distance away. If he can't see things that are producing photons more than 20 miles from him, he lives in a bubble of near total darkness, only seeing the reflections of light that are bouncing off local things, and has never seen the stars. That's a horrifying fate. theironjef fucked around with this message at 18:05 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 17:52
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Str 42 is actually massively underwhelming for a creature of that size. That means it can lift 100 tons. If it puts one of those whales in its maw (around 120 tons for a blue whale, lowballing it), its speed drops to 5 ft and it comes to a full stop. If it eats both of the whales in the picture, it takes on more weight than it can carry and most likely sinks. He'd be fine, those are humpbacks, they top out around 40 tons. Plus you can't just apply deadlift weight to a whale, you have to factor in bouyancy and displacement. He should probably be way stronger though.
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May 3, 2014 19:08
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Alien Rope Burn posted:This is true, but I'm not sure if there are rules for that. I am now starting my work on Cerulean Seas 2.0 which includes bouyancy offset values for strength calculations and has a sidebar on when things you eat stop being encumbrance and start counting as just more you*. *no I'm not that sounds awful.
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May 3, 2014 19:13
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Here comes episode 18 of System Mastery. Pressed for new material, we look to the used shelf in our store, and dredge up a 2nd edition copy of Big Eyes, Small Mouth. http://wp.me/p3NGX8-ds It's better than we thought! It's not great exactly!
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May 7, 2014 03:10
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ah, the game of playing any anime genre... badly? A lot of it is just when it came out, where when the question is "how do you simulate a genre" gets the answer "you simulate all the physical things in it!" And so it becomes a GURPS lite, only without any grounding to it and with all sorts of math exploits because of the dice curve and wonky point system. It's super true. It turns right into a GURPS game. Abilities are literally half of the book as they desperately try to cover any conceivable anime genre, and it's clear sometimes they did it by genre and not by covering necessary ability spreads, as they have a lot of abilities, and a lot of drawbacks, that are near-duplicates. I'd say the concept of doing a book that lets you play the breadth of anime is stupid, since that's like saying it covers the breadth of cartoons, but then again I own all of the Steve Jackson TOON line, so I know that's also been tried already. Anyway next weekend we'll be covering Furry Pirates, so no one else ever has to.
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May 9, 2014 16:23
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I still just can't get over the disconnected defense roll. If you maximize for defense it basically doesn't matter how accurate your opponent is, since you're not dodging them, you're just dodging your defense value. Oh and Toon basically stayed Tom and Jerry/Looney Tunes forever, though the second book had the best random tables ever in the back, base 6 percentile tables for random toon race with results like "sentient photocopier" and "fire hydrant" on them.
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May 9, 2014 17:31
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Also, BESM uses averages of various stats. I hate this and want it to be gone, but lucky me I tend to review old stuff so it probably is mostly gone. It was especially bad in Prime Directive, since the XP system was completely abysmal anyway, so that if you finally did manage to get enough XP cobbled together to raise your phaser skill, it didn't change your rolls til you also raised your Marksmanship stat (or whatever it was called). Has anyone ever seen the D20 Prime Directive? Or the GURPS one? My partner hated that game like ... nothing I've seen before, and I really want to know if the other variants are as bad.
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May 9, 2014 18:15
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FMguru posted:The original PD used its own system, and it is pretty much the sort of train wreck you'd expect from a system designed by a company that publishes an infinitely detailed star trek wargame with 4000 pages of rules. Didn't someone do it for a previous iteration of the F&F thread? http://systemmasterypodcast.com/2013/09/24/episode-4-prime-directive-the-star-fleet-universe-rpg/ Boom! Had to cut some of the older ones down to just the .zip files since hosting space isn't as cheap as running a podcast for free apparently.
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May 9, 2014 18:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Next: No faffing about this time - Mindworks! Mindwurks? Mindwirks! Mindwerks? Mindwyrks! Well, that's enough of that. Mindverks. And I love this book. From the PC race that is just three long static statblocks to the company that makes lovely robots.
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May 16, 2014 14:39
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yes. Awww sure it can. You just can't see the little white strip on the polaroid where she wrote "First Experiment: Two minutes before they all regenerated and killed all my spare AIM henchmen! We were all so naive then."
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May 16, 2014 20:24
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Moto42 posted:You guys are thinking to hard about Rifts. Impossible. No such thing. I sit around all night making Rifts characters and making my girlfriend also make Rifts characters.
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May 18, 2014 17:15
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Save vs. Pedophila. I do like that they at least have "well I guess if you were already gay this insanity would turn you straight." That could have gone worse, like "You become super-ultra double gay like Carl in 5th period history!"
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May 19, 2014 19:48
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Green Intern posted:Being a psychiatrist is apparently on par with inescapable berserker rage! Who knew? It's so tongue in cheek that they forgot to include any line that says "hahaha don't we have fun here? No look the character only thinks they are a psychiatrist and is actually crazy."
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May 19, 2014 22:01
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We at System Mastery just finished reading and discussing Furry Pirates: Swashbuckling Adventure in the Furry Age of Piracy so we could bring it to you. Spoiler alert: The book sucks. Double secret spoiler alert: It's not because of furries.
theironjef fucked around with this message at 20:50 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 16:27
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That subtitle seems suspiciously superfluous. "Just in case you missed the title, this is what the game is about." I think it's overcompensation. Furries are largely an afterthought in this book. I never thought I'd want more furries.
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May 20, 2014 16:53
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Right? We were so excited to crack this thing open and start making fun of furries like the major leagues. Then we get in there and it's just dry pirate information and terrible rules, except they did a Find & Replace to change all instances of "man" with "furry" and added species to most of the famous historical figures of the time. Like there is nothing to make fun of outside of sperginess and a lack of drat furries. There's so little dedication to the genre conceit that the word furry is the word they use for the whole group of species. Not anthro, not just "man" like you see sometimes, but furry. "10 furries are needed to operate this cannon" etc. There's also like zero puns or jokes or plays on words and species. Nothing whatsoever about animal nature. The kings are all lions, but never once does he describe one as predatory, or mention that they are lions because lions are naturally kingly, or anything. They're all lions because there's no interracial breeding, so if one of the royals is a lion they have to all be, the end. *Note that neither of us at System Mastery is down with the fur-l. We were just really hoping for something weirder to make fun of than what we got. Like I would personally hope for a better game for furries than this. Those goofballs in their big suits need good gaming books too. theironjef fucked around with this message at 21:13 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 21:05
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