FATAL & Friends 2014-15: The Neverending Storygame

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Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Davin Valkri posted:

Just to confirm, is Ron Edwards the guy who's writing that alternately boring/awkward game set in the "TOTALLY REAL AND REALISTICALLY CRUDDY" middle ages that had the questionable stance on women? Or am I thinking of someone else?

You, uh...you'll have to be more specific.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2015 20:27

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:40

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Libertad! posted:

Edwards' RPG is Circle of Hands, where the PCs are part of an organization comprised of just them and 2 GM NPCs. In the setting there are 2 kinds of magic, Black Magic (weird reality-bending poo poo harmful to people and land) and White Magic (angelic, heavenly poo poo which is actually harmful to the souls of 'impure' mortals). Normally most mages can only ever learn one kind, but the people in the Circle are the only ones who can master both, making the PCs special in that way.

The setting is pretty much modeled after the most technologically primitive aspects of early Medieval Europe. There are no expansive nations, just petty fiefdoms. Knowledge applicable beyond simple agriculture and violence is almost non-existent, and society follows a 'might makes right' philosophy of violence.

The one bit which caught people off was that the society was patriarchal, and I think one setting description mentioned that torture, rape, the killing of children, and all that jazz was a setting feature due to the brutality of the culture. The original description doesn't seem to be on the KickStarter or setting rundown, so I figure it was altered.

Hahaha, yeah, that's pretty gross, but I meant more that "TOTALLY REAL AND REALISTICALLY CRUDDY middle ages settings that has a questionable stance on women" describes an awful lot of terrible, wannabe-GRRM* heartbreakers.

_{*And, to be fair, some of the worse parts of Martin's own writing.}

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 01:39

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Kurieg posted:

My favorite bit of BJ Zanzibar stupidity were the were-squirrels that were stronger than the Garou in every conceivable way.

Is that supposed to be some sort of allusion to Squirrel-Girl?

# ¿ Apr 8, 2015 21:35

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

It's also hilariously-parochial in its ignorance of fantasy source material. Dude's never heard of the Mahabharata and its Astras?

# ¿ Apr 25, 2015 16:51

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Imagine a locker door slamming shut over a human face...forever.

Edit: although to be fair, things like Conan doing the locker-slamming are just as dumb coming from the opposite direction - a time not nearly as past as we'd like it to be, when anti-intellectualism was widely held up as moral virtue. I mean it still is, to an extent, but now we can mock stupid people for saying stupid things in real time. With the internet. On Something Awful Dot Com. We're living in the future, y'all.

Thesaurasaurus fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Apr 25, 2015

# ¿ Apr 25, 2015 16:58

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Libertad! posted:

I thought it was neat in showing how the overgod Ao really didn't give a poo poo about anything in reality other than gods, and he liked Myrkul's idea so much he kept it in as a way to force people into following religions and thus empowering the gods. Whether or not the gods were okay with it (Kelemvor, for example) is another matter entirely.

At least, that's my interpretation, but it does color the setting quite a bit when the creator of all reality's a terrible, horrible dickwad. Then again, I think that Dragonlance's handling of the "good" gods and Istar and the Cataclysm comes off as worse, so maybe it's just my perspective talking.

Pretty much any fantasy setting with both objective morality and real, provable divinity is gonna run hard into the Problem of Evil. This is one reason I enjoy Exalted despite all the myriad reasons to not enjoy Exalted: even when gods and elementals and such aren't being outright dicks, they don't necessarily have any sort of better answer to difficult moral quandaries than anyone else. Some of them try! But the road to hell, etc...

# ¿ Apr 25, 2015 21:55

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Plague of Hats posted:

I never got the "adolescent fan fiction-y writing is mostly girls" thing. So much of that poo poo is just as much teen boy power fantasy, especially the stuff that gets paid and published.

Answered your own question there, I think!

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 05:49

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

theironjef posted:

Only ever got to use them once (which I think is probably a common experience) so it's hard to really say. I liked the death-defying nature of them, but a lot of those "final destiny" writeups felt samey. It was generally like "You retreat into the mists of history and keep using your rad powers but now it's all ethereal and mythical" next to "Your power grows into legend and people speak of how you used your rad powers in awestruck whispers for centuries."

Both of which are fairly uninspired but still beat out the Redeemed Drow Epic Destiny, in which your Immortality legend is that your soul spontaneously transmigrates and you are reborn as a pure, ~~Aryan~~ surface-dwelling elf.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Pre-3rd Edition Wizards started with a random or DM-determined spell list, and had a maximum number of spells they could ever learn, and had to roll a percentile dice to scribe a spell from a scroll into their spellbook. 18 INT would give you a 95% chance to scribe spells and lift the cap on the number of spells you could learn, but RAW you couldn't guarantee yourself an 18 INT.

Finding scrolls of spells was also a total crapshoot if you were doing it RAW since the DM was just rolling off of random drop tables. Maybe you'd find a Scroll of Sleep ... except the scribe attempt fails, and then maybe you'd find a Tenser's Floating Disk and that one you get to scribe. This would lead to the D&D computer games with optional rules for guaranteeing successful spell scribe attempts (on top of max HP per level-up), since you couldn't just grind dungeons until you got the scroll you wanted and you couldn't bribe the non-existent DM into just giving you what you wanted. The fact that the DM was the sole arbiter of what spells were available also made it easier for the DM to ban whatever it was they felt you shouldn't have: it just wouldn't ever drop.

There was also that whole thing about the number of pages of your spellbook that was consumed by scribing a spell getting exponentially higher with higher-level spells, to the tune of the Wizard having to spend several thousand gold on new spellbooks for higher-level spells, and since you could only carry so many books, you had to pick and choose which ones you'd carry with you even if you had all of them scribed already.

By the time you got to AD&D 2nd Edition, Wizard specialization kits were a way to somewhat alleviate all this pressure: you'd get an extra spell of your choice in the spell school you specialized in, so you could at least guarantee yourself a Sleep or a Magic Missile so you weren't completely useless for the first couple of levels barring more DM bribing. The Sorcerer was essentially a way of making a Grand Bargain: you could choose what spells you had for sure, in exchange for the ability to learn everything.

It was 3rd Edition that really busted down the walls of this whole system because now the Wizard could learn whatever spells they wanted as they leveled up, and they were guaranteed to learn them.

I guess that's an improvement over a la carte but otherwise unrestricted access to reality-breaking superpowers, but I'm not sure it's much of an endorsement that the primary balancing mechanism for spells was the same as that of the Deck of Many Things.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 18:11

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Kai Tave posted:

Symbolically coded for your convenience.

...no coin/disc/pentacle?

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 02:47

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Kai Tave posted:

It's hanging around Anwaren's neck

Ohhhh, there it is. I didn't notice it, next to that Gandalf-grade wizzarding staff.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 02:59

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

The not-TerraForMars Mega Man bugs are unironically the best thing I've seen from this trainwreck, and should get their own spinoff once the rest of the line crashes and burns.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 20:56

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Werewolf: the Apocalypse was a game that wanted to both have werewolf society be horribly flawed and also have it be largely correct about the world and never really reconciled those two notions.

Right about the problem, wrong about the solution?

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 22:06

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Bieeardo posted:

I may be giving the oWoD writers far too much credit, but I seem to remember passages with definite disconnections between things as practiced and things as preached, across the corebooks for different product lines. Not that any of it really matters when you end up with metaplot churning things up beyond recognition.

True, but was this an intentional writing device to establish ambiguity, or just White Wolf's time-honored tradition of writers never communicating and then the editor just Frankensteins whatever they give him into a book?

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 00:34

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:40

Thesaurasaurus: Feb 15, 2010; "Send in Boxbot!"

Kurieg posted:

The problem is that the War of Rage already paints Garou in a very negative light. The revisionism came from some of the Fera books where the other breeds explain their own culpability or provide details that the garou had forgotten or never knew about in the first place. Turning it more into something like if Putin's wife died while visiting the US on a diplomatic mission, and the US' response was "Serves you right you warmongering rear end in a top hat."

That's not even getting into the part where you find out that the person who killed said Garou was one of the Nagah, and the Nagah didn't admit it because their leaders figured that they were the most important fera and admitting their culpability would turn the entire Gaian world against them, so they hid and let everyone else die.

E: You get somewhat of a sense that the reason the Fera are forgiving the Garou now is because they know they're somewhat culpable, but they're keeping the finer details secret because the Current generation are fairly level headed and concillatory and they'd be understandably miffed if they found out they've been hoodwinked for however many millenia.

I actually really liked the Corax take on their role in history, in which Raven's part of the current-day mess was trying to play relationship counselor between the Weaver and Wyrm, and, uh, wow, that SO did not work out as planned. Also what the Corax did during the War of Rage was to shut the gently caress up and hide, even the ones who wanted to take the fight to the Garou, because Raven was like "No, that's stupid and you'll just die; eventually they'll come back to their senses and they'll need someone to rub their noses in this the next time they're about to pull something this dumb, 'cuz Gaia knows they won't do it for themselves."

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 03:54

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