FATAL & Friends 2014-15: The Neverending Storygame

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Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Just Dan Again posted:

I had a fun time reading everybody's explanation of caster supremacy, something that I'm thoroughly familiar with in 3rd, 3.5, and Pathfinder (not sarcasm, I really did enjoy the step-by-step, thorough analysis and elucidation of the concept!). My focus was on the constant cries of "Caster Supremacy Returns! All Hope Lost!" in regards to 5th edition. From what I've seen and read, the spells seem well-balanced to their level of play. For example, the Sleep spell in 5e will often make a big difference in a low-level encounter

The issue here is that the Fighter doesn't have anything like that.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 03:23

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 05:27

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

PurpleXVI posted:

If I really wanted to get offended by it, I'd roll my eyes at it because it seems pretty close to all those really bad Young Adult books where some irrelevant ordinary person is just out of the blue revealed to be the ANCIENT SCION or the LAST DESCENDANT or THE ULTIMATE CHOSEN through no real effort of their own. Since it picks by merit, though, I guess the only real issue I can see is that it kind of closes out a bunch of potential storylines just because, like, it prevents any number of stories about needing to unseat a corrupt monarch, or the king secretly being in league with the forces of evil, because the Golden Hart will always have picked someone just and worthy of the role.

Haven't people earlier in this thread mentioned that people can get corrupted in various ways after the Magic Deer chooses them to be king? (Personality-changing head injury, whatever the Shadow is, etc) It apparently doesn't have the ability to check the future.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 15:08

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

The Iron Rose posted:

wait how else is it pronounced

The e on the end of "dere" isn't silent.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 19:16

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

oriongates posted:

Honestly, I think it's because that while the Freak might not be as powerful as the Comte he probably would be more annoying to stat. Figuring out how many wound points he has, how many times he's used Master of Flesh, etc.

Wouldn't its effectively infinite supply of signifigant charges mean it's long since hit the cap for those boosting effects?

# ¿ Jul 30, 2015 21:52

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

oriongates posted:

Definitely. Most of the Significant rituals have severely diminishing returns. Hex is clearly not worth the effort and the Cartesian Curse is actually probably worse on the "risk vs reward" scale than the Pentacost ritual. Although the Pentecost ritual requires more people be murdered, finding multilingual victims is relatively easy compared to what you need for the Cartesian Curse (the easiest options being the heart of an avatar and the brain of an adept, but you still need a third).

The spittle of a servitor option seems like the only one which doesn't require poo poo like murdering a dude or observing an item constantly from harvesting to after the ritual's done. Less available than the body parts of magic guys, but it also doesn't require you to actually hurt anything.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 13:14

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Given that we've got a caveman, an alien, and a robot shown there in the first image in the book I'm not sure why that one person was confused about getting weird-rear end concepts whenever they ran it?

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 06:04

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Ixjuvin posted:

Here's some other things that drive me crazy! All weights in the books are given in gold pieces, even though as you mentioned 10gp nonsensically weighs a pound anyways so they could have just divided all the weights by ten and spared us the goddamn trouble. All the distances are given in inches, wargames-style (except when they aren't!), and to convert those to "real" distance you turn it into feet and then multiply it by ten if you're in a dungeon or like a hundred if you're outside.

Isn't this back when the point was still "how much gold can we drag out of the dungeon"? Tracking your carrying capacity in terms of "how much less gold can we carry out" seems appropriate.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 22:18

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Young Freud posted:

Gun Brother sounds like it should be a religious order of gunslingers, a la Tetragrammaton Clerics from Equilibrium, or the disciples of Fury Road's Bullet Farmer.

Or at least somebody who gets a gun as part of their starting gear rather than a sword.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2015 18:31

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

oriongates posted:

Sadly, the Diesel would be disqualified by still being alive. Some might also argue that he lacks the enduring fame necessary to qualify as an Icon, but I would never dream of saying that.

I think "has to be dead" is part of the enduring fame condition. If they're still actively drawing attention, we can't really tell how enduring their fame is, can we?

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 09:08

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Doresh posted:

Measurements

Aventuria uses the metric system, renamed to sound more "historical". Meters are steps, kilometers are miles, kilograms are stones and tons are ashlars. Smaller measurements are usually come in multiples of 20 or 25 to make it less granular than the actual metric system. A stone for example equals 4 ounces.

This sounds absolutely infuriating and custom-designed to confuse the poo poo out of people.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2015 21:37

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Kurieg posted:

The Infomancer Taboo seems... bizarre. Like the point isn't the control of information, more that you're making sure that no one can get anything valuable out of any kind of media, including yourself.

It also makes it exceedingly difficult to remain informed about literally anything.

Yeah that goes beyond just "self-destructive" to "completely non-functional in society".

# ¿ Sep 10, 2015 17:43

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Night10194 posted:

(the example knight character is even a woman in disguise and the book makes it pretty clear that that's quite common)

Is it like, rude to pry into if a knight is actually secretly a woman or something?

Because I think it'd be hilarious if officially it's not allowed, but it's also considered very, very rude to even try to see through it.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 10:09

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

gradenko_2000 posted:

That is, Numenera was released in 2013. The Strange was released a year later. The Cypher System Corebook was released this year. The two preceding games already had these issues: having to spend points from your pool and having the pool represent your health didn�t sit well with some players. Having to spend XP to gain in-session benefits fought against wanting to bank XP to level-up your character didn�t sit well with some players. But they never tried to address these issues, even as optional rules.

And there's one very simple method of dealing with that that I've suggested before: Your XP can only be spent on temporary benefits, and when it's spent it turns into a point to be used on permanent benefits.

Suddenly everything changes, rather than hoarding your XP to spend it on permanent stuff and forgoing temporary benefits, you have to spend it on short-term/momentary stuff. And now it's encouraging people taking risks so they can spend the point on saving their rear end (or whatever) because until they do they can't spend it on permanent stuff.

I believe I first suggested this for Seventh Sea, which would really benefit from it on the actual swashbuckling risk-taking front.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 15:06

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Halloween Jack posted:

I am probably unfairly biased against Exalted. The last Exalted game I played was pitched to me as Beowulf and Sun Wukong Team-Up, and ended up involving jokes ripped off from Love Hina.

I'm pretty sure that's the fault of the group not the system/setting.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2015 19:34

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

ZorajitZorajit posted:

Okay, shame on these guys for ripping off Neuromancer. At least they didn't abuse Red Star, Winter Orbit or Hinterlands, because those are my very favorite Gibson pieces (and I'm a huge Gibson fanboy.)

But... did they actually LIKE Highland 2?! Because this is Highlander 2. It's just missing General Katana and the planet Zeist.

Excuse me it's not Planet Zeist, it's The Past.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2015 05:00

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Young Freud posted:

amateur "grinder" (bio-hacker)

Why is that called a grinder?

# ¿ Nov 29, 2015 20:52

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Young Freud posted:

Because it's a real life term for people like this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinder_(biohacking)

I'm not sure where the etymology of the term came from, but it's probably a play on words for "organ grinder" and grinding in a RPG/MMO for experience.

The RL equivalent of grinding in an MMO is "practice". :doh:

Biological hacking is the opposite of repeating the same action over and over to get better at it.

Damnit now I remember leaving through some comic in the store once that called this same sort of thing "grinding" and used the same reasoning for it and having the same "BULLSHIT" reaction. I knew there was some reason I was getting angry about this.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2015 01:24

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Doresh posted:

And the Priesthood can also not be blamed for lords waging war over living mannequins.

Didn't the priesthood previously keep lords from warring with each other much/at all? So no that's still at their feet.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 20:53

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Grnegsnspm posted:

So, for example, you want to know what The Darkle is. It got mentioned a few times as being important but the editing of this book is atrocious and you have no idea. "Fine", you think to yourself, "I'll just look up the footnote for the Darkle so I can see why some important artifact sounds like my nephew's baby talk." Darkle - A physical manifestation of abaddon, found encrusted in the brain of Samiel, an Abzulim, after it had died. After a protracted history of tragic influence, the vampiric ruby-like substance was placed within a receptacle, the Femme Darkle, until stolen in A.D. 1990. Thanks book. That has helped me immensely. If you then try to look up Femme Darkle in the book, it is just as inscrutable and sends you on this wild goose chase of hunting down terms so you can understand other terms.

You made this up right?

# ¿ Dec 8, 2015 21:17

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

unseenlibrarian posted:

a Dog-form Konghoki,

Dog-shaped soulbot buddy! :3:

# ¿ Dec 13, 2015 23:55

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Falconier111 posted:

SAVARGINIA

An entire society of loving WIZARDS specifically designed to be a society of loving WIZARDS. Long, long ago, two wizards got bored of, quote, �smashing planets and turning gods into paperweights� (presumably in 3.5 ) so they decided to make their own setting, with mutant bat chess and hooker cities. The result was Savarginia, a collection of city-states so MAGICAL that occasionally a city is obliterated and replaced with an even weirder one without fanfare due to MAGIC.

Is it bad that I kinda want to read about this setting instead of the Madlands?

# ¿ Dec 27, 2015 21:26

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Night10194 posted:

All they really do is make the society look more pathetic and transparently false.

Speaking of transparently false I like how they present company towns as not drowning the residents in inescapable debt, completely unlike what happens whenever one turns up unregulated in reality.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2016 21:46

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Terrible Opinions posted:

Maybe it's time to reread the Cedar Point work thread and just imagine they're all terrible furries, and therefore deserve it.

The what thread?

# ¿ Jan 2, 2016 22:13

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

LatwPIAT posted:

I'd be tempted to write a review of M20 here - and there are some hillarious gems in it, like how picking up 6 Paradox permanently turns you into a ticking timebomb - but it would be a mean-spirited hate-reading, so I'm not sure whether it would be fair to do so...

This is the FATAL and Friends thread. On Something Awful.

Mean-spirited hate-readings are absolutely on topic.

Hate-read the poo poo out of that book.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2016 23:14

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 05:27

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

You don't actually have to believe in what you're doing to be an Avatar, but you gotta walk the walk.

It's being an Adept that involves sincerely believing in the magic poo poo, and they're all self-destructive in some way.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 00:31

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