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Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Seconding LouiCypher. Stealth mechanics seem to be a sticking point in other systems, I'd like to see how Torchbearer handles them.

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Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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I unironically love the warshovel, here.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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The Chi Descendants are pretty much the Shi from Fallout 2, if anyone failed to catch that particular reference.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Shi

I want to a see Super Trans-Genetic Mutant with the Big and Dumb and Ham Fisted traits. :colbert:

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Hold on just a loving second.

Kurieg posted:

Prestige Classes
Gladiator/Blademaster
3rd level gets you double your strength to damage with 2 handed weapons.

Kurieg posted:

Exotic weapon proficiency: Thorium:(Proficiency with the non-thorium version of the weapon)
If you're proficient in a Thorium weapon, in addition to not taking a -4 penalty on attack rolls with it, you can add 1.5X your strength to damage with it(2x if it's 2 handed)

You already add 2x your strength bonus to attacks with 2 handed weapons just as a general d20 rule, right? These are additional multiplications? I'd like to put in an order for a Thorium Lance, then, please...

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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So if you wanted to play a Fallout RPG, would you actually want to paint the identifying marks back on and use Exodus? Or is it just not very good even if it was a licensed product?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Doresh posted:

(Hint: The secret is hidden in her name :ssh: )

...Cherry Tapping?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Cythereal posted:

No, it very explicitly is not. You have to take a special attribute to make a Wonder look normal-ish, otherwise it's immediately obvious that this thing absolutely shouldn't work and is patently insane.

I'm vaguely recalling reading or hearing about raiding a mad scientist's lab where the floor was this branching, sprawling tangled web of daisy-chained power strips plugged into other power strips. When the characters eventually combed through the mess it slowly wound its way back to the epicenter of the power network, which was a single power strip plugged into itself. When they unplugged it, everything else in the building shut off.

It seems like whatever special attribute this is, it's just the art of having mysterious black box casings for your Wonders instead of proudly displaying that your evil island's power grid plugs into an irradiated cantaloupe.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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You mention hacking a laptop as an Epikrato 1 effect. Is Epikrato the Axiom a genius would use to make some sort of hacking supercomputer that lets them pull off Watch_Dogs / Live Free or Die Hard levels of absurd machine control?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Hey, Traveler, what's with all the Metal Gear Rising quotes?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Kai Tave posted:

So basically "Exalted only with cars and poo poo I guess." I mean, there's Shards of the Exalted Dream which is actually not terrible and has a couple "Exalted only in the modern day" setting spinoffs. It still uses the 2E Exalted system as a baseline so, y'know, have fun with that, but the actual settings themselves aren't bad.

I'd go beyond 'actually not terrible' and go as far as to say the fighting-game subsystem that it has is pretty good insofar as such things go.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Doresh posted:

the Impostaur (just a dude with a mask)

That is an awful, awful pun.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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DigitalRaven posted:

Speaking of, has anyone done Slasher?

I'd like to see something like this because while I am not good with World of Darkness, Serial Killers vs. Werewolves seems like a great Scifi original horror movie/campaign concept.

Vampires are also acceptable.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Mors Rattus, Cythereal. Thanks a lot for your writeups on Hunter and Genius! They've been a blast to read and I'm really psyched to see more.

Mors, by the way, what the gently caress is up with the Lucifuge now that we've had Demon and the God Machine Chronicle out? Are they just moreso in the 'what the hell this doesn't fit' category?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Wapole Languray posted:

I can answer this!

Basically, there's like... a dozen different loving things in WoD that you can call "Angels" and "Demons", which all sorta got mashed together by humans, which is why the Lucifuge, Infernals, Dark Spirits from Werewolf, all the crazy poo poo Mages fight, and Techno-Gnostic Robots all get called Demons in some way, shape, or form.

In fact the Official "Demons" are like, the things least likely to ever be called a Demon because their whole thing is to be as stealthy and unknowable as possible and basically have jack-all to do with the rest of the WoD.

I'm not sure why I expected WoD lore to not be a clusterfuck. Thank you, though.

quote:

many of them have small pet demons whom they hate (and whom they are hated by) but who cannot help but obey their orders. Sometimes, devils follow them around, acceping any punishment inflicted on them with a strange sort of pleasure.

Is this an actual mechanical thing because I would very much like to play a Lucifuge member who's sole supernatural talent is that tiny little hellcritters love the gently caress out of him.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Traveller posted:

Does being in VASCU also give you a Specialty in Cult Films?

Is that a Deadly Premonition reference?

EDIT: Slasher is something where I'm extremely interested in, fascinated by, and I feel would extremely rapidly progress to 'I am too uncomfortable to continue playing this' in an actual game.

Crasical fucked around with this message at 02:28 on May 30, 2015

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Talking completely out my rear end here but Hunter, Changeling, Slasher and Geist are my favorite lines from nWoD.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Slowly picking through Mors' posts because they're fascinating but I only read this thread before lunch while I wait for the labs to open up. The Cainite Heresy sounds like a horror movie shot the vampire's perspective, the cattle, the kine, the human masses that you're so used to infiltrating, to moving amongst like a wolf through sheep... and then suddenly they're LOOKING AT YOU and they have knives and enough hate and insanity to drown you in.

pkfan2004 posted:

Puberty for Dagonites is a lot more physical and visible in the real world than for the other bloodlines. A budding Leviathan will notice that something is different with their body, and not in the "oh I have hair there" sense. Dagonites start growing bumps and rashes that reveal patches of scales and webbing and gills; burst that strange lump on your arm and you'll release a handful of mutated, gribbly sea life that were living in a lump full of your own blood. From there, the big question is how much of those things within you are you, and how much comes from your strange heritage? What comes from your power and what comes naturally from your flesh?

This immediately came to mind.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Cythereal posted:

Both takes are valid, in my opinion. Every Hunter group is presented as morally ambiguous so you can use them as whole-hearted good guys or malicious bad guys as your story prefers.

Except for Ashwood Abbey. They're sorta more tolerable if seriously cut back on the rape and torture but I seriously would like to see the pitch for a coven of Abbey hunters who fit the bill of 'Whole-hearted good guys'.

I actually had to have PKFan explain to me -why- the Les Mysteries are so dangerous because I've never read Werewolf. Aside from the 'You're breaking SPIRIT LAW and a Woof is going to come gently caress you to death' part of spirit-pacts, I mean.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Mors Rattus posted:

The Beauty Jar (5 dots) contains the severed head of buxom 50s starlet Jayne Mansfield. She died in a car crash, age 34, when a truck swerved to avoid another truck. Her decapitation is said to be a myth, but that is itself a myth to cover up that her head was stolen by a mad doctor hoping to reanimate an undead bride.
Geniuses! :argh:

I haven't been paying close attention to UA but I did read the writeup on Dipsomancy and my immediate thought was a washed-up hack of a writer crawling into booze magic and using the 'God looks after drunks' power to start crapping out bestsellers after his fourth glass of scotch. Write drunk, edit sober...

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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I've been told straight-up that Geist is a terrible line and I'm terrible for liking it.
They might even be right, I'm not very good at nWoD.

I don't get why people point to the lack of a clear present antagonist for Sin Eaters, though. The fact that you have permanent deathsight and that ghosts know intuitively that you can see and hear them always seemed to imply that you're going to be being hassled by unquiet dead for a myriad array of requests while walking down the street or driving or trying to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones.

Yeah, you can enslave, banish, or kill and eat the ghosts, but that's Not Helping and just filling up the Underworld instead of helping them pass on. And for all the ghosts you can put to rest with a postcard containing their final message to their family, you get ones that got poisoned by a nutritional supplement and need Ghost Leverage to shut down the corrupt executive marketing the pills, or got eaten by a werewolf and want revenge, or any number of requests that are gonna be a bitch and a half to complete.

EDIT:

Halloween Jack posted:

Why are they considered overpowered, by the way?

The defensive type of Spooky Powers, Shroud Manifestations, are quite good at giving a big chunk of armor. Tack that onto the fact that Fog Men can spend a point of plasm to turn a point of damage into 'bashing, which I'll take later' means they have a double-sized health bar. They can get quite tough.

Also the Boneyard, which is your personal Spookyzone where you hold sway, is really huge and can cover a small city at higher levels, apparently?

As far as I know aside from that it's a few it's a few specific effects (Phantasmal Marionette lets you create an ectoplasmic body based on your geist, which is a copy of your character plus some stat boosts and you're only out a bit of hauntjelly if it gets splattered instead of having died.)

Crasical fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Jun 17, 2015

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Spider tank.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Thesaurasaurus posted:

...no coin/disc/pentacle?

...OH! Swords, Cups, Wands, Coins. Minor arcana.

Completely went over my head until you pointed it out.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Kai Tave posted:

I'll just lay it out for you, Jarzon is a fundamentalist theocracy that considers women to be second-class citizens, homosexuality to be a perversion, rhydan, vata, and night people to be dangerous monsters, and unregulated study of arcana to be tantamount to consorting with the Exarchs themselves. Needless to say, they and Aldis do not get on. The Jarzoni attempted several large-scale attacks against Aldis but their forces never made it past the hazards of the marsh, which is the only thing besides some very delicate diplomacy that's preventing yet another war.

What particular flavor of 'fundamentalist theocracy' are we talking here? Crusades-and-Inquisition catholicism? Vaguely islamic? Something else?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Where's the dividing line between 'practicing sorcery is illegal and will get you banished' and 'water purification crystals and lamps'? There's obviously a difference between 'magic' and 'sorcery' going on here.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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I keep finding myself putting together Blue Rose character concepts in the back of my head in idle moments, and I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Kai Tave posted:

Embrace the magic deer.

Yes, but, d20 system.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Kai Tave posted:


Stunning Attack - when you make an unarmed attack, you can choose to forego the damage in exchange for having the target make a Fortitude save, DC 10+unarmed damage bonus. If the target fails, it’s Dazed (can take no action, but defends normally) for 1 round. If it fails by 5, it’s Stunned (can take no action, -2 Defense, no Dodge bonus to Defense) for 1 round. If it fails by 10, it becomes Unconscious.

They turned the Monk’s gimmick into a learnable feat!

The fact that this isn't tied to monk level and instead your damage bonus has turned this feat from 'Ancient kung-fu secrets' to 'a heightened tactical awareness of any and all opportunities to kick bad guys in the dick'.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Kurieg posted:


And whoever came up with this title font needs to be dragged out back and shot.


That is a godawful font.

So I'm not big into Cthulutech, what's the deal with these symbiotes? They're here so you can play Venom or Fillia from Skullgirls?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Fossilized Rappy posted:

And lo, did Steve Jackson Games say "make something that would be kicking rad to airbrush on the side of a van." And it was so, and it was good.

I'm looking forward to how this compares with Shadowrun.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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How do the Half-Dwarf, Half-Orc ect. moves work? What constitutes a 'core move'?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Thanks for all the Genius posts, Cythereal!

It was an interesting read.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Hey, Gradenko, question! Does Spheres of Power ever touch on the 'props' of magic use? Spell Components/Staffs/Wands/Spell Tomes for the arcane gentlemen, Holy Symbols for the divine casters, and bottles of Snake Oil for alchemists? Or is all of this assumed to be done away with and you just have your powers and your mana pool?

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Doresh posted:

But can you munchkin the Companion into an attack-spamming whirlwind with around a dozen arms?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Spheres of Power
One special note is that the Companion can learn any feat that it's eligible for given its stats

Additional Limbs [Form] - the Companion gains one of the following: a head, 2 arms, 2 legs, a tail. This does not grant them any additional attacks in and of themselves, but the book mentions that you can leverage these limbs to get extra attacks from the Alteration sphere.

Battle Creature [Form] - the Companion is a warrior; it has proficiency with simple weapons and has 2 masterwork weapons that it can wield when it is summoned. The weapons gain a +1 bonus per 3 Hit Dice, up to a maximum of 5. If this form is taken a second time, the Companion gains proficiency with martial weapons, can then be summoned with martial weapons, and is considered an nth level Fighter per Hit Dice for the purposes of feat prerequisites.

Hekatonkheires are a go.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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You don't need Whirlwind attack, it's a metaphorical whirlwind. A thing you could do with PF Eidolons and apparently still can do with this Spheres system is use your points to stack on more and more and more arms onto your critter. A creature with ten arms and the Multi-weapon fighting feat can wield a short-sword or hand-axe in every one of it's ten arms, and use full-attacks for a ten-hit routine at -2.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Doresh posted:

This get's even better if your Eidolon/Companion has access to Pounce.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Natural Aspect [Form] - the Companion gains one of the following special monster qualities: pounce, leaping attack, rend, trample, rock catching, rock throwing, Fast Healing 1. This talent can be taken multiple times.

Yep.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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gradenko_2000 posted:

Spheres of Power




TBQH I don’t really get this school. It seems like a replacement for the standard item creation rules, but it’s so limited and so niche.

It's basically expanding out the Creation/Minor Creation spell to a whole school, with some useful quirks stapled on, like sundering equipment/walls/locks, changing enemy equipment to paper or sand, FINALLY being able to hurt people by dropping summoned objects on them, which has always been an obvious thing that the rules disallowed.

I have fond memories of playing a psion in the old 'Red Hand of Doom' module, and being able to perform some pretty finky tricks with Psionic Minor Creation, so I'd err on the side that it's worth being a sphere. You can still make water balloons full of deadly contact poison, at the very least.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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I seriously love the soggy, kelp-covered aquatic ghost pirate cowboy with his antimagic and force-fields of DETERMINATION and dual pistols of absolute smite-y murder.

Toss that on the pile of RIFTS character concepts that I'd actually love to play, except, you know, RIFTS.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Doresh posted:

Talismans

Shikigami can be bound to an inanimate object (usually; wait till the next post) to serve as a talisman. This has quite a few advantages: Summoning a Shikigami through the talsiman is somewhat faster than normal summoning (with the Shikigami acting normally in the next round), it can be used even by non-sorcerers, and the Shikigami will always be the same instead of a new creation every time. Even getting destroyed only has it retreat back into the talisman (with a few exceptions).

I like the idea of a non-sorcerer who's gotten their hands on a talisman for a Flight/Additional Damage/Explode shikigami and has gone all mad-bomber with it.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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Quick googling of the names provided no interesting facial hair, aside from Sterlac's very slight case of mutton chops.

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Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

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gradenko_2000 posted:

>Cactus people?

As a cactus enthusiast, I'd like to know what book that was in so I can go dig it out of the F&F archives. I bet it was really dumb.

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