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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, given the core idea is that you're supposed to be an Inquisitor's elite (or at least on the fast track), it's pretty embarrassing to keep missing early on. One of the biggest disconnects with 1E Dark Heresy was GW promoting it as "Like Eisenhorn, the novel series about badass Inquisitorial agents!" and then Black Library basically making ratcatchers in space. I don't think the game itself actually bills characters as elite badasses, it's pretty clear in a few places that the Inquisitor may basically be using you as a passel of coal-mine canaries, it's just that the way GW pitched it got people psyched for something other than what the game as produced was angling towards. So I don't think that issue is solely the game's to own. Also, characters always seeming to fumble and fail all the time seems to be an issue with d100 systems in general where there's no bell curve and even an expert doctor with Surgery 80% is still cutting the wrong leg off one time in five whenever he has to roll for it. Like, Unknown Armies is generally regarded as a pretty decent implementation of a percentile based system and a big part of the advice it gives you boils down to "don't actually roll unless it's a stressful situation." Of course combat is always stressful, so.
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# ¿ Oct 10, 2014 06:12 |
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# ¿ May 13, 2024 11:43 |
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Yeah, that was more or less my point. "This system works best when you interact with it as little as possible" isn't really a ringing endorsement. I think some of the 40K games' "whiff factor" may not be solely attributable to the characters being a bunch of scrubs so much as the fundamental resolution system being one where, like with the d20 system, results are linear rather than having any sort of distribution curve.
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# ¿ Oct 10, 2014 06:30 |
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Halloween Jack posted:All the Warhammer games are hosed when it comes to odds of success because the designers (in WFR2e, at least) didn't really know what they wanted them to be. Everyone I know who runs and enjoys Warhammer Fantasy assumes that a standard, unmodified roll represents being under fire or in lovely circumstances--otherwise, if you have the skill, you can do it under normal conditions. But the textual example of a skill roll, if I remember right, penalizes a guy using the Sneak skill because it's dark, and the skill system generally encourages the GM to throw around penalties for minor bullshit. The 40K games categorize a skill roll at +0 (that is, no bonus or penalty, just a flat roll against your base skill) as "Challenging," so the implication is there that rolling against an unmodified skill DC represents something that's an actual challenge as opposed to the expected baseline but at the same time the games (to the best of my knowledge) don't have any sort of "Outside of stressful situations assume characters can simply automatically succeed at the skills their trained in" provision. Also the listed example modifiers given for each skill can be all over the place in terms of how reasonable they are. Halloween Jack posted:Shadowrun and 40kRP seem similar to me in that your combat options only matter before combat--you decide to specialize in ranged vs. melee, in Shadowrun you make a tradeoff between concealability and stopping power, etc. Once combat starts, you want to hit first, hit repeatedly, with your most powerful weapon that uses your highest combat skill. To be fair you've just described like 98% of all RPGs and a huge swathe of other games as well.
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# ¿ Oct 10, 2014 22:03 |
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No, I think Vincent Baker has come right out and said that AW's sex moves are just that, things that happen as a result of sex and not just any sort of moment of intimacy.
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# ¿ Oct 11, 2014 23:06 |
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ZorajitZorajit posted:Wait, Monsterhearts does involve actual, verifiable, supernatural events? I've been under the impression that all of it existed on a magical realism level of metaphor and the characters strictly exist as normal teens that are just being described as movie creatures. Although, now that I say this, I'm pretty sure the answer is "you can play it either way, stupid cis-het." Monsterhearts is essentially Supernatural Romance Drama: the Game. Twilight is heavy influence on it in the sense that the author is coming at it from the angle of "what if you critically examined the hosed up relationship politics of Twilight instead of glossing it over as ~so romantic~ and then milked that for a game of cutthroat high school drama?" Buffy is also a big influence where the various supernatural happenings were all metaphors for various growing pains and tribulations of high school life, but were also vampires, were-hyenas, mummies, and giant snakes. Personally I have very little interest in playing Monsterhearts myself but I still recognize that it's a quality project that could easily have wound up like every other RPG or RPG supplement that aims to deal with topics of sexuality and relationships, i.e. someone's skeevy wank-fodder or an excuse for boner jokes. If you aren't feeling it then don't force yourself to play it or run it, it's not like you're obligated to do so in order to prove your "good ally" cred or anything.
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 02:18 |
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Xelkelvos posted:I do like the idea behind The Fury, even if the moves aren't the best. It's a shame because I can probably relate to some of the themes behind it. I think this actually highlights another weakness of the Fury which is that in a game that's all about high school drama and teenagers being awful to one another (plus magic and monsters), it's kind of weird to have a skin that's "the bullied kid." Even ignoring the rather awkward "have you ever wanted to play a school shooter?" sales pitch, the fact is that bullying is something that all the skins should be having a chance to weigh in on, be affected by, or perpetrate (sometimes one after the other), so having a single character type be built entirely around a thing that's liable to happen to every character as a matter of course feels kind of shallow and one-note, as does the overall arc of the Fury's narrative...get bullied, freak out, kill everybody.
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 05:42 |
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Mors Rattus posted:If I were gonna go for a telekinetic/telepathic type person in Mosnterhearts, I'd probably want to design it around a different thing. (Leave the psychic domination to the Queen, anyway.) I'm thinking I'd probably go for the person who provides a shoulder to everyone. The listener, who knows who likes who and who's planning what and is always sympathetic... I kind of feel like this partially infringes on the Ghost's territory given that skin already has some of that "generally ignored by everybody, but you can also be the person that that they come to vent to before they go back to ignoring you again" going on in it, plus other interesting stuff besides. I dunno, maybe there's a way to do something with the base concept of "that one kid who has an invisible target painted on his or her back," which is definitely a thing I think everybody who's been through high school can recall an example of, but I don't think "literally Carrie" is it.
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 06:58 |
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Xelkelvos posted:"Literally have an invisible target painted on their back" would probably have a name like "The Cursed" or "The Haunted" but I feel like that would play into more of knowing or having done something that they would never want to mention and being haunted by it. Except for the invisible target/haunted angle it sounds like you're essentially describing the Mortal there.
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 23:07 |
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Yeah, the thing is that the guy who didn't realize Monsterhearts was a game about literal monsters was on to something in that the primary focus of MH lies with the high school tribulation angle and you could honestly run a game of MH where the monstrous angle was largely metaphorical. A Skin that doesn't have a solid high schooler angle at some point in its development is gonna fall flat which is what seems to be happening with a lot of these Skins. It doesn't help that the main selection of Skins already cover most of the obvious and iconic high school drama roles right from the outset.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2014 02:13 |
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I think it's definitely to an RPG's credit when it makes people want to create their own content for it, that's cool. On the other hand, a lot of people make stuff without really asking anything like "okay, what lets this playbook stand alone, bring something new to the table, and differentiate it from these other playbooks." The Werewolf doesn't have to have a monopoly on violence, but if you're going to make a Skin that's all about violence and anger and lashing out like a dumb rear end in a top hat then you probably should be asking yourself "what makes this meaningfully different and worth pursuing than the Skin that's already all about this?" And in the case of something like the Proxy I can't even tell what anything is supposed to be about there beyond "is a guy from some Slenderman video apparently." You're being hunted/are hunting some sort of Cthonic entity...so what does that have to do with flawlessly editing someone's social media stuff? And what's with the mask? Why does anyone want to interact with you, exactly? I haven't seen the whole thing yet but so far what I have seen looks like a jumbled mess with no rhyme or reason.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2014 06:08 |
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ActingPower posted:I assumed that, at least through one interpretation, the Proxy was It, and all of the harassment and darkness they experienced was self-inflicted. They have a mask alter ego, they can appear anywhere in the forest, they are stalker-obsessed with someone... It all points to someone who believes in It but is the only true executor of the things attributed to It. The question then becomes how does this fit into the supernatural romance framework that Monsterhearts is, at its core, all about? Being a monster is really secondary to being an actor in a high school soap opera, and while I'm sure there's plenty of skeezy Slenderman fanfiction out there it isn't quite the same thing.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2014 19:49 |
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My last sit-down gaming group was pretty cool but the GM and his wife were big C:tD fans and occasionally wondered if anyone would be interested in playing it and the response from everybody else was always "no." Pretty much everything being discussed here is why.
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# ¿ Nov 14, 2014 21:11 |
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Night10194 posted:Every single time they try to make a Hunter type character a villain in White Wolf games, they almost always seem to come off as the hero. That police officer is the actual protagonist, these loving faeries need to get brained. "Lack of self awareness" is a time honored White Wolf tradition. C:tD just runs the extra mile with it.
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# ¿ Nov 14, 2014 23:16 |
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Golden Sky Stories is all about helping people with their problems though, including mundane problems like "Susie has lost her favorite bracelet in the woods, can you help her find it before dinnertime?" Changeling: the Dreaming, as far as I can tell, is basically a game about being evangelical otherkin fighting against the tyranny of science, 9-5 jobs, and librarians. GSS is a game about helping people, C:tD's characters are inherently selfish and self-absorbed. You can almost see how, with just a slight change in perspective, Dreaming could be a game akin to Vampire where the point is that you're playing a monster and exploring the consequences of that...but the writers instead play it painfully straight and it comes off as completely insufferable.
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# ¿ Nov 14, 2014 23:46 |
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:That was pretty much how the Hunter the Reckoning writers went about it and it worked. I don't even remember there being a story that presented them as something other than monsters. It's how Changeling: the Lost does it too. The fae are bastards, faerieland is not a magical place of rainbows and lollipops (except when it is, then everything is awesome...until the fae that brought you there gets bored of you and tosses you out, or decides to make all the lollipops poisonous as a prank, but don't worry, they won't let you die because they aren't done playing with you yet.) Halloween Jack posted:I'm curious as to what you guys mean about Mummy. Are we talking up-its-rear end-pretentious because they didn't learn from oWoD, or trenchcoats-and-katanas because they didn't learn from oWoD? Because I'm fine with the latter in measured doses. It's more the former than the latter. Mors Rattus touched on it with regard to, for example, their decision to reintroduce variable TNs back into the system for no real reason other than "we just felt like it" despite not actually considering how that interacted with anything. Also I vaguely recall the lead on the project being kind of a tool for some reason.
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# ¿ Nov 15, 2014 07:18 |
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Also Reckoning had metaplot. If you want strings-free monster hunting then what you want is Hunter: the Vigil from the nWoD. Reckoning also suffered from having a pretty serious mismatch between what the art promised and what the game was actually like. The art, especially the pieces they previewed running up to the game, was full of stuff like badass dudes casually slinging double barrel shotguns over their shoulder and Buffy-esque vampire slayers, but the actual game itself is about un-badass people being imbued with very minor supernatural gimmicks and then being thrust into a world they're completely ill-equipped to deal with and may not even be sure they aren't just having a schizophrenic breakdown when the literal voices in their heads start telling them to kill the guy next door.
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# ¿ Nov 15, 2014 19:11 |
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Night10194 posted:Also, if I remember, the crazy Messengers giving you the powers were loving Exalted. Yep! Hunter didn't just have metaplot it had meta-metaplot as for some reason the writers of various lines at the time felt the need to figure out how Exalted would eventually become the World of Darkness Earthdawn-to-Shadowrun style. Hunters were imbued with teeny-tiny fragments of Solar Exaltations except without anything that made being an Exalted even halfway cool to play as. Reckoning was basically "Frailty: the RPG" in practice, which disappointed a lot of people who actually wanted "normal humans get sick of insufferable monsters making GBS threads everything up and shoot them in the face."
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# ¿ Nov 15, 2014 19:24 |
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Again, Hunter: the Vigil is basically everything that people actually wanted Reckoning to be in practice...a metaplot free, more "toolkit" approach that lets you play anything from blue-collar Joes and Janes banding together to keep your neighborhood safe to elite government operatives with ultraviolet lasers to people with supernatural gifts, all about hunting down monsters and loving their poo poo up.
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# ¿ Nov 15, 2014 19:45 |
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Bieeardo posted:Given that 2E Changelings got buffed to the point where they ended on par with or better than other supernatural splats, I wouldn't be surprised if there was editorial interference keeping the nasty, brutish mundanes from holding a candle to the elder lines. It's up to your GM to decide which interpretation is correct.
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# ¿ Nov 15, 2014 20:30 |
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nWoD werewolves are kind of a pale shadow of their oWoD unstoppable rage monster selves too. I think the most powerful supernatural splat is a toss up between mages and geists. Actually demons might be up there too but I don't have any hands on experience with them.
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# ¿ Nov 16, 2014 01:31 |
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Traditional Games > World of Darkness: It seems to be largely unintentional
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# ¿ Nov 16, 2014 01:44 |
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Night10194 posted:There are two ways to play Black Crusade: Ridiculous power metal melodrama and Shenanigans. One involves quests across blasted hellscapes to accomplish insanely ambitious goals, similar to Rogue Trader. The other involves landing a shuttle on a pirate king and stealing Khorne's lawn chair. Personally I'm a fan of combining the two approaches, especially because the former has a tendency to become the latter without any prompting. Fiasco's tagline is remarkably appropriate for Black Crusade, given that they're both games about powerful ambition and poor impulse control.
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# ¿ Nov 22, 2014 20:02 |
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theironjef posted:I've always avoided it because every description of play I've ever heard is basically concentrated monkey cheese. I assume it's way more fun to play than to hear about. Rogue Trader (the FFG version) is basically the ultimate extension of Shadowrun's or D&D's "kill everything, steal everything" themes writ large. You start out with so much money that the game doesn't even keep track of individual money units, you own a kilometer-long starship that can bombard planets from orbit, but the entire point of the game is "get even richer, no, richer than that, more rich." Fundamentally it's a game that's about reveling in the sort of ridiculous player-character behavior that other games only implicitly encourage rather than explicitly telling you "yeah, you should totally go pick a fight with that daemon over there because its horns would look baller over your mantlepiece." I wouldn't call it monkey cheese but I don't think it's intended to be a very serious, dramatic game either, no.
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# ¿ Nov 22, 2014 22:48 |
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Dark Heresy only works well as a grimdark Paranoia because that's the sort of game that was delivered rather than the one that was promised, which was "badass Throne agents like in Eisenhorn." 1E Dark Heresy was honestly not a very good game ruleswise either.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 00:04 |
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Forums Terrorist posted:How's Dark Heresy 2nd Ed for Eisenhorning it up? DH2.0 adopts a number of good changes that FFG gradually developed over the line...no more pseudo-level "ranks," the psychic power system incorporating the "fettered/push" system which lets psykers attempt to do poo poo without always having to wonder if this time they use the 40K equivalent of a cantrip if they're going to derail the entire session, tracking individual prices is gone in favor of an Influence stat, etc. In addition to this starting level characters get some pretty solid perks...ways of spending Fate Points to auto-succeed on certain tasks, a few choice bits of starting equipment, things like that. It's still low on the power scale as opposed to something like Rogue Trader or Black Crusade, you still aren't going to start out as a Hero of the Imperium right off the bat unless the GM hands out some extra starting XP but the overall impression is that a fresh-faced DH2.0 character is someone who's shown some genuine promise to be recruited by the Inquisition as opposed to DH1.0 where starting acolytes were basically a collection of schmucks rounded up by the Inquisitor's third assistant Vice Interrogator to go stumblefuck around a cave somewhere and die. Inquisitors themselves are still an elite advance that takes a hefty chunk of XP to work your way up to though, so attempting to recreate the Eisenhorn dynamic where the Inquisitor himself comes along on adventures with his agents is going to require starting things off at a higher level.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 02:36 |
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unseenlibrarian posted:The main thing with Rogue Trader is that it's setting itself up as sort of the opposite of a lot of previous sci-fi RPGs. in that a lot of previous games figured that PCs would be in the Han Solo/Firefly/Traveller mode, just poor dudes on a lovely ship barely scraping by. That's some of it. Even the most run-down ramshackle Rogue Trader still has an enormous ship crewed by thousands of people armed with guns that can level cities and a piece of paper that basically gives him carte blanche to go do whatever he deems necessary to get rich or die trying. It isn't a game that really encourages a staid, reserved sort of approach to things, and beyond that is the fact that unlike Only War or Deathwatch where you exist in a chain of command and get given missions, in Rogue Trader the player-characters are explicitly at the top of the pyramid. This means that it's entirely self-directed, which means that campaign goals aren't a question of "can we do this?" so much as "what do we need to do to make this happen?"
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 06:32 |
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Well that was kind of dumb of them because unlike DH1.0 where one thing got promised and another delivered, Rogue Trader was never, to the best of my recollection, ever billed as being a game about low-rent space truckers at all. You can absolutely play the last remnant of an all-but-defunct dynasty in a (comparatively) tiny ship scrabbling for profit, it's just that even a down-on-her-luck Rogue Trader is still someone who operates on a level well above that of 99% of the rest of the schmucks in the galaxy. You'll never be counting your individual pennies and wondering if you'll be able to afford food this month because the designers, and I'm inclined to agree with them on this one, think that poo poo is boring.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 07:15 |
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All I'm hearing is more support for my "those people are dumb" theory. Back when the 40K RPG line was brand new it was straight-up announced that there were going to be multiple lines of core books, each focused on a different thing (though at the time the only ones that were set in stone were Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch) and each of which would be correspondingly varied in baseline power level. Or to put it another way the 40K line is a toolkit that's being released one standalone line at a time.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 07:25 |
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Plague of Hats posted:I think RT was my favorite sub-line because it gave the least fucks about all the garbage that dominates every last other thing for 40k nowadays. Well understandably FFG has to turn everything they make for the 40K games over to GW for approval and so they can't just go crazy-nuts and do whatever they want but by all accounts it's the stuff that has to do with Space Marines, aka GW's main cash cow, that they give the most exacting scrutiny to and everything that isn't Space Marine centric gets more leeway. Honestly while FFG's editing and proofreading is often hot garbage and the systems the games use are decent but not anything spectacular a lot of the setting stuff they've come up with is fantastic and packed full of plot hooks and adventure seeds. The Black Crusade setting of the Screaming Vortex in particular is pretty great. Supposedly (from what I've heard through that paragon of reliability known as the tradgames rumormill) with the new DH2.0 book FFG is getting even more leeway to do their own thing so hopefully we might see them revisit some of their other lines along the way, Rogue Trader could certainly use some updating.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 07:38 |
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theironjef posted:I may have posted on the wrong quote. I have little beef with Rogue Trader, all the random monkey cheese stories I hear tend to come from the one where people play Chaos Marines. Lots of "Then I mailed vomit to his children and took a poo poo in his ear" stuff. That's Black Crusade. Okay, here's the deal with Black Crusade. It's a game that's ostensibly about playing the "bad guys" of the setting, i.e. Chaos (though one of the points of the 40K setting is that Chaos and the Imperium aren't really that much different from each other so it's a matter of degrees). That said, there's nothing in any of the Black Crusade books that encourages that sort of monkey cheese behavior or even any sort of skeezy poo poo either. Like, take the Book of Vile Darkness for D&D3E as a counterpoint. Black Crusade doesn't have Nipple Clamps of Exquisite Agony, there's no corpse-loving prestige class. Even the Slaanesh book, the one about the god of excess, doesn't have any of the stuff you'd find in, say, Cthulhutech, no rape shoved everywhere, I don't even think there's any cheesecake art. The point of Black Crusade is basically to be a grandiose supervillain. You have two tracks, Infamy and Corruption, and you want Infamy (your reputation and renown for being the baddest dude) to reach 100 before your Corruption does. If you do that then you ascend to demigodhood and win the game, if your Corruption hits 100 before that though then you have an overdose of Chaos-stuff and become a mindless monstrosity instead. The game wants you to do stuff like conquer planets, lead the titular Black Crusades, steal important relics, summon daemons, fly spaceships into other spaceships, and generally ham it up all the time while you're doing it. That said it is a game about being "evil characters" and there are some people out there who use that as an excuse to do dumb poo poo. Like with the 40K minis game, how there are some people out there who play Chaos as an excuse to sculpt dicks and tits all over their miniatures or paint swastikas all over everything. But that's down to those players being dumb idiot assholes and not the game encouraging or rewarding that sort of behavior. As always the answer is not playing with dumb idiot assholes.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 20:01 |
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There's a whole thread full of'em here, plus multiple active PbPs in The Game Room at any given time.
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# ¿ Nov 24, 2014 06:55 |
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Play Dirty is a great resource for aspiring GMs. All you need to do is read it, then do the exact opposite of everything Wick does.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 02:34 |
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Davin Valkri posted:Wow, he sounds like a complete passive-aggressive jerk. How was he still getting players after the earlier ones quit? You could probably find four to six people willing to endure being punched in the balls if it meant they got to play D&D regularly. A lot of gamers will show up to bad games because, to them, bad gaming is better than no gaming.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 03:25 |
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That whole part of Play Dirty reminds of of once, when I was actively moderating RPGnet, someone started a thread asking for advice in the general tabletop roleplaying forum on how he could administer electrical shocks to his players in order to make gameplay more "visceral." Safely he qualified, he wanted to administer electrical shocks to his players safely. All in good fun, like you do around the gaming table, sending electrical shocks through your friends' bodies whenever a monster lands a critical hit against them.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 05:10 |
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I feel like bait-and-switch games were considered a cool thing to do at one point, I remember that I used to see threads about them on RPGnet all the time, almost always some variation of "Hey I want to pull a bait and switch on my group, is this a good idea or the best idea y/n?"
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 05:24 |
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Davin Valkri posted:Shouldn't bait-and-switch games be done with eyes open? I mean, I would expect a game with evil Jedi to at least give a heads up like, say, "we'll be using some assumptions from KOTOR 2 about how the Jedi aren't as great as they make themselves out to be, so make your characters along that lines." Okay but then by definition it's not a bait-and-switch game. Literally the whole point of such a game is "players go in under one set of assumptions, GM then throws those assumptions out the window." You thought we were playing dungeon crawling D&D but surprise it turns out it's actually Star Wars and you guys are just on a backwater planet, here come the TIE fighters (literally a thing I saw someone describe). Or, closer to the topic, you thought we were playing a game of swashbuckling high seas adventure but surprise it's actually a game about weird aliens or Cthulhu or some poo poo, what the gently caress was 7th Sea's metaplot again, oh and there's no sailing going on either.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 05:34 |
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Yeah, even with a group that you're long-term friends with and you all know and trust each other, pitching a game in one direction then yanking it in another is a great way to gently caress things up because if everybody's on-board with your pitch then that's what they want to play. I mean, there are degrees. If in the course of playing through your D&D campaign it turns out that the organization the players thought was good and noble actually turns out to be a secret evil conspiracy that's not on the same level as "and now we'll play Star Wars only I'm changing everything around and not telling you so your reasonable assumptions can get you into trouble, tee hee." Also something Alien Rope Burn didn't explicitly touch on that's worth highlighting is that Wick has an entire chapter dedicated to passive aggressively (or just straight up aggressively) trolling players who bring minmaxed loners and aren't engaged with the game, when the very tricks and tactics he's been espousing in previous chapters are exactly how players fall into those sorts of habits. John Wick posted:[After I had my GMPC kill off her grandmother for no reason other than to be a huge rear end in a top hat] Malice retired the very next day and nobody bought a DNPC again. He's proud of this, but then goes on to complain about lone wolf minmaxers who'd rather play Starcraft than engage with his games. Go figure.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 05:52 |
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quote:I know what you need. Oh, yes. I do.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 06:38 |
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Don't forget "if you have to talk, whisper or pass a note." Tons of fun, that John Wick.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 09:42 |
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# ¿ May 13, 2024 11:43 |
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Speaking of authorial quirks that instantly alert you to how much of an rear end in a top hat someone is, anybody who unironically appends a statement of theirs with "heh, heh, heh" or something along those lines is probably some sort of tool.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 21:50 |