|
I admit I'm slightly disappointed that the near future STALKER South Pacific hack seems to have fallen behind the couch cushions (I mean, good for John Harper, he seems like a cool dude, but a novel? Eh), but if even half of the stuff unlocked for this game comes out it's still going to be a really solid game.
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2015 18:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 15:30 |
|
|
Something I hope the full game goes into a bit more detail on is a clearer explanation of what separates Murder from Mayhem and when to call for the latter over the former. Is Mayhem strictly meant to be nonlethal brawling? If your intent is to kill in a fight do you ALWAYS use Murder?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2015 21:10
|
|
|
So Murder is "quick and quiet" and Mayhem is "loud and messy." I can live with that given that Mayhem has other applications as well (wrecking things, causing a ruckus) while Murder is strictly, well, Murder. It seems a little fuzzy around the edges but I suppose that's by intent.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2015 08:55
|
|
|
DalaranJ posted:How's this work? Choose one die to be your action score and one to be your effect score? You don't choose, at least in the last version he was kicking around, but basically yeah. The highest die becomes your degree of success and your second highest die becomes your degree of effect.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2015 00:28
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:I like this! I was already off-the-cuff deciding whenever an action would need an effect roll or not - having that built-in would be a nice bit of streamlining. DalaranJ posted:I'm wondering what will happen to some of the pieces of design that will be removed in this case. But I certainly agree that one roll resolution is going to be better than the current strategy. To add more to this that I sort of glossed over, he also trimmed down the number of "Effect stats" to four and for the one-roll version changed how they work. Instead of diamonds in an effect granting you dice to roll, since obviously that would defeat the point, diamonds in a particular Effect type grant a scaling modifier. Everyone starts with one diamond in Force, Insight, Maneuver, and Power which give you a -1 to the result of the associated effect score (i.e. if you roll a 6, 4, 1 and had a -1 in Insight then you would use the 6 for determining success and then the 4 would be used for effect, which the -1 would turn into a 3) and then as you add more diamonds the modifier goes to +0, +1, and +2 and two, three, and four diamonds respectively.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2015 06:42
|
|
|
I would rather a game designer change stuff they feel isn't working...y'know, actually doing design stuff...than go "oh well, I already put one version out there so I guess it's set in stone" and release something sub-par. Rolling both to determine threshold of success and then rolling effect for virtually everything was not an elegant setup, neither was having six different Effect stats with unclear applications. If anything this would make me regret backing a project less, I have no idea why this would make someone think "oh boy, here we go again."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2015 18:42
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:No, I agree with you. It's just telling me that in hindsight I should have just waited for it to be done instead of paying money now for something I won't be able to enjoy for months or more because of my other priorities. You shouldn't contribute to Kickstarters then because "waiting months or more" is part and parcel of that particular experience, and even if John Harper was like "okay, I'm not changing any of this no matter how clunky it is, gogogo" you would still be waiting months or more for everybody to finish writing, laying out, and illustrating the approximately one bajillion stretch goals unlocked over the course of the Kickstarter.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2015 19:25
|
|
|
The quickest turnaround I've ever experienced when Kickstarting a project has still been measured in months, which I believe was Night Witches which started their Kickstarter in October of 2014, released the final digital version in January 2015, and considered hardcopy fulfillment to be complete in March.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2015 20:10
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:Yes, precisely. I shouldn't unless I am going to play it from the KS preview, or unless it needs my help funding to exist, or unless it's a fellow designer I want to support based on some personal connection, or unless I really want to read it right away for whatever design/research purpose, or if there is a stretch goal I want to help it hit, or unless the game is basically done and the turnaround time will be very fast. I don't know what any of this has to do with your initial post which complaining about John Harper changing system elements before the game is finalized. Since it sounds like you were uninterested in the project to begin with and have a whole shopping list of reasons why you shouldn't have pledged I'm not sure what your objection to him refining things before it goes to press is in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2015 22:33
|
|
|
It's mind boggling to hear people saying that tinkering with a game post KS is a big red flag when Exalted 3E is a thing that should still be fresh in peoples' memories.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2015 00:56
|
|
|
Plague of Hats posted:That's a pretty low bar you're setting, there. Seriously though, ever since the final-ish Ex3 leak hit everybody who was actually looking forward to it has generally had positive reactions to it but even they're going "this really could have benefited from another round of people going over it and clarifications" and instead what the Ex3 team did was spin lovely analogies about Christmas presents and then when the first leak hit rather than embrace it and use it as as an opportunity to build more hype and solicit feedback they went "ugh, no more semi-open playtesting PERIOD." Meanwhile John Harper is changing things that don't work based on playtester and community feedback after releasing an extensive quickstart that showcases the system, playbooks, and gives enough tools to actually run games before the Kickstarter even finished funding and that "sounds like a red flag" and is cause to regret backing it? Yeah sure, okay.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2015 05:34
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:I haven't been paying attention to Ex3; what happened with the rules? An unfinished rules document got leaked once and this prompted the Ex3 team to immediately cancel what semi-open playtesting they were doing in retaliation. Then the rules got leaked a second time, a mostly complete draft sans art and layout. The general consensus seems to be that it's an improvement over Ex2 though it's still crunchy as hell, but a number of charms are full of "naturalistic language" that make their function more ambiguous than they should be and there's also stuff like BP/XP costs still being dumb in that classic way (y'know, where it's cheaper to raise things higher during chargen with BP than with XP later on so the system rewards you for hyperspecializing out of the gate) and Crafts having eleventy different variations on a dice reroller, nothing that's utterly gamebreaking (yet, give it time) but things that could clearly have benefited from a more open sort of playtest. Which it didn't get because something something Christmas presents. Jimbozig posted:Yes, the fact that the core mechanic was what needed revision based on playtester feedback is a red flag. Like, duh, obviously it is. Changing your core mechanic can have knock-on effects and can be very tricky. "This is a huge problem! Oh but I'm sure he'll work it out fine and obviously he should revise it. But it's still a problem!" I'm not even sure what your point in complaining is then if you believe that John Harper is doing something that's good and that he's professional enough to do it right. Also what knock-on effects would those be, exactly?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2015 18:10
|
|
|
Humbug Scoolbus posted:I liked the two rolls, but then I like games with lots of dice. I like rolling dice when it's interesting to do so, but while the actual skill roll itself combined with the three positions has a lot of interesting interplay in terms of "what do these results do to make the game more interesting/tense/exciting?" all the additional effect roll did was add "roll to deal damage" to virtually every task as an additional step and I can't muster even the slightest amount of care for losing something like that. A "roll to deal damage" that required every character to have an additional second separate layer of stats just to determine how well you could roll to deal damage on top of the stats you roll to determine your success threshold. It's basically the clunkiest part of an otherwise fairly trim and simple system and if it goes I'm not really sure that the game is losing much. I'm also hugely skeptical that this is going to have "knock on effects" to any significant degree given that the system isn't super complex with tons of moving parts and it's not like John Harper is going "poo poo, I better throw all of this out and start over again with card-based mechanics and a d30 dicepool kicker for flavor."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 00:02
|
|
|
To be fair, it would be the work of a lazy afternoon to repaint the Whisper as "the Hacker" and just treat computer stuff as essentially magic, which is how a lot of modern heist stuff involving computers does anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 00:30
|
|
|
So far as I'm aware the clock system is remaining firmly in place, though I have to admit I don't really see anything TOO exciting in hitpoints by any other name, but there you go. The only thing I'm aware of him provisionally changing is consolidating the two rolls into one along with cutting out some of the more nebulous Effect stats.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2015 23:49
|
|
|
Oh it's handy to be sure but I don't feel like it's anything amazing, and it certainly doesn't make me wistful that he's thinking about cutting out the specific roll that's all about seeing how many ticks you put on the clock because unlike, say, 4E's "bloodied" condition there's not even anything basic and binary that hinges off of a clock being 5/6ths ticked as opposed to 1/6th, it's all pretty much in that nebulous "up to the GM" realm to determine what that 5/6th clock means in game terms. And just like with hitpoints something that's 5/6ths full on the clock is more or less just as unresolved/as much of a threat/etc. as it was when it was at "full health" so to speak. It's funny too because the game has a whole resolution system that's all about various levels and degrees of success contextually measured against various positions of difficulty which is really pretty neat and interesting and more than a simple binary pass/fail...but that's just one part of things and after using that you then move on to a separate resolution system that's much less interesting and dynamic which seems to serve the sole purpose of going "wow, you totally aced that roll to do a thing...buuuut you rolled like poo poo on the clock so someone needs to try again."
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2015 01:59
|
|
|
Saman posted:Have we gotten a post-kickstarter option to put in money for access to the quickstart and a pdf when it comes out yet? I just barely missed the end of funding. I don't think so but you could always email John Harper and see if you can PayPal him some money and swing a deal that way.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2015 05:50
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:
Some interesting things of note since the last time I checked (way back in the v1 playtest): 1). Claims. These are a cluster of nodes springing outward from the central point of your Lair connected to one another by various paths. When you decide you want to expand your operation you can seize these holdings by tracing a path from your Lair out through the nodes towards the one you want. Taking a holding is considered a major undertaking that'll result in bad relations with whoever you stole it from and/or good relations with that group's enemies, and in addition to the usual benefits you get from a job laying claim to holdings gives your crew other longterm benefits as well. Examples include fences that give you bonus dice on post-job rolls for burglary scores, gambling and drug dens that provide you with extra coin, lookouts and city records offices to give you better intel, etc. 2). Mayhem is now renamed to Battle. 3). Planning and engagement. I don't recall if this was in the v1 playtest or not but it looks unfamiliar. Basically at the outset of a job, which you still initiative by choosing a plan of attack and giving the GM a detail to an approach-specific question, the GM rolls a number of dice based on how strong the detail in question is. If he rolls high then there are minimal complications at the outset, rolling poorly can mean that the crew has to deal with unforeseen circumstances and difficulties. The three possible twists the GM can draw upon are "someone is separated," "an unexpected threat," and "you lose the initiative." On a 6+ the GM chooses none, on a 4-5 he chooses one, on a 1-3 he chooses two. 4). For the Teamwork section the actions that the person On Point can take has been pared down to Lead a Group Action and Set-Up, no more Overcome. Likewise, the Follow Through action has been taken out for those on Backup, though Set-Up still exists and still gives an effect bonus to the next person who capitalizes on your set-up. 5). Changes to action rolls. There's no more +1d if the target matches your background, now anyone can add +1d to any roll by Pushing and accepting 2 stress. This is in addition to being able to take +1d for a Devil's Bargain. Taking Desperate moves now gives you a bonus XP each time you do so which you can apply towards advancements (as a supplement, not entirely on their own, i.e. if you have some regular XP you can pad it out with Desperate Move XP but you can't buy new stuff with Desperate Move XP all on its own). 6). Playbook moves seem to be in the process of getting changed around some, still a lot of "get +1d when" but now everybody gets a move that gives them some sort of advantage against ghosts. The Hound looks to be getting renamed to the Shrike. The state of the playbooks is kind of rough in this draft, a number of placeholders and unfinished move lists.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2015 04:04
|
|
|
Might want to bring it up with John Harper then if he's still soliciting feedback.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2015 22:25
|
|
|
On the one hand having a skill called "Murder" was kind of cute, but on the other hand I was never fully satisfied trying to differentiate between three different skills for hurting other people and where one skill left off and another began, so I can't say I'm too sorry to see the skill list consolidated.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2015 20:29
|
|
|
QuantumNinja posted:but look forward to a mess of bad [homebrew]. Said everyone about every RPG ever.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2016 02:42
|
|
|
QuantumNinja posted:Yes, but PbtA (and now, BitD) seem particularly susceptible to terrible (and, for BitD, overwrought) game design. No it isn't, don't be ridiculous. The sheer volume of terrible homebrew written for any edition of D&D you care to name dwarfs the amount of terrible *World homebrew by an order of magnitude. How many awful fanmande World of Darkness games are we up to now? All of this is discounting the dozens upon dozens of late 90's websites dedicated to converting everything under the sun into Hero and/or GURPS stats. There is nothing unique about PbtA or Blades in the Dark in this regard whatsoever except they happen to be new-ish. e; and it's hard to make a Shadowrun hack that's worse than the actual Shadowrun system so I've never understood that reaction, oh no, someone's going to make a terrible Shadowrun game, unlike all the top quality Shadowrun RPGs out there such as
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2016 03:11
|
|
|
Not that I disagree with any of that, but again, it applies to basically every RPG ever made. It took until the new World of Darkness came out that I actually found the idea of playing a game about being vampires or werewolves halfway interesting, and that was over a decade after V:tM came out. I'm still waiting on something that's Exalted But Better. Bemoaning the shoddy state of everyone's halfassed homebrew is like, welcome to the hobby friend, this is what it is.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2016 05:01
|
|
|
Am I wrong or weren't there supposed to he a couple of additional crew types, Grifters and Vigilantes? Vigilantes is relegated to a weird part in the "hacking the game" chapter along with a link to a website that doesn't work and Grifters are nowhere to be seen. Did these get spun off into supplements?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2017 23:02
|
|
|
Dzurlord posted:I don't think that there was ever any really deep discussion about it, but I could have missed it. This is more or less how I feel about it (spoiler alert, I haven't played BitD but I've played an RPG or two before if that counts). There's a certain kind of player out there who, during every social encounter with someone, will wait for the nearest convenient pause in the conversation to go "I roll X to see if he's lying." And I'm kind of okay with that really, that's what social skills are for...if you're going to have abilities like Bluff or Insight in a game then there's no reason why someone shouldn't be able to simply declare their use of them the same way the Fight Man can go "I use Athletics to break the door down." It's not the use of the skill itself that gets tiring after a while but going through the same ritual time after time does get tiring. D&D4E attempted to address this with passive deductive scores, so if your Passive Insight was 15 then everything that would require a DC15 Insight check or lower you just automatically succeeded at instead of having to constantly stop and go "okay I'm rolling now, okay what does this roll tell me." Blades seems to be taking this a step further by simply giving the social guy an option to know without any sort of busywork whether someone is lying or not, period. Now me, I don't think this undercuts that particular portion of social interaction so much as it recontextualizes it. The quintessential example of this is the old standby of "Mr. Johnson tells you that this is an easy job and the target has minimal security." So if the GM informs the Slide with this ability "oh yeah and surprise, he's lying" the question now becomes instead of "Is Mr. Johnson lying to us?" it's "What is Mr. Johnson lying about?" You know that he's lying, which means there's some deliberate misinformation coming your way, not just a potential run of bad fortune...if Mr. Johnson truly believed this would be an easy job with minimal fuss your ability wouldn't ping, even if it then turned out that whoops, they raised security recently because of something entirely unrelated. So now instead of starting your potential investigations and groundwork from square one, you have a more insightful avenue to go on. Is he lying about it being an easy job because he's trying to cheap out on the payoff? Is he lying about it because you're being set up and this is actually a trap of some sort? You know something's off and can attempt to prepare accordingly, but it still requires some more investigation or social interaction to try and tease details out of Mr. Johnson. Or you can immediately confront him with the knowledge that he's lying and see what shakes out. Or you can sit on the information and let him think he's fooled you while you look into things on your own. Either way the ability simply lets you cut through the bullshit formality of "okay I roll to see if he's lying, I mean I'm PRETTY SURE he is but let's be positive" and simply lets you give them the answer (yes) while then asking what they plan to do with that (not entirely precise) knowledge.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2017 19:42
|
|
|
thelazyblank posted:Just make sure they don't speak in yes or no, black and white statements I would say that if they really wanted to do this you could go ahead and let them try but it would probably count as something you'd want an action roll for, with successful results allowing them to steer the conversation in a way that lets them glean more refined information but worse results causing the conversation to go sideways as the other party realizes they've been caught out and are now being grilled. I mean you probably shouldn't be turning every conversation with a dodgy NPC into a roll because that's exactly what this power is supposed to be preventing (plus you probably shouldn't be making tons of rolls anyway) but if a player is really insistent that they want to effectively interrogate someone then, well, that would probably require a roll as much as someone conducting an actual interrogation. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Feb 5, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2017 07:33
|
|
|
QuantumNinja posted:editing like Shadowrun (see: "health penalties are explained in the 2nd paragraph on page 31") I have no idea what you mean by this. Health penalties are explained in the section titled "Consequences & Harm," yes. How is this supposed to be bad editing again?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2017 02:09
|
|
|
So I'm clear, your criticism of the book's layout and editing, described as being as bad as a game notorious for extremely lovely editing, I'd that if someone tries to skip past the section all about consequences and harm and glean info straight off the character sheet first that they might not fully comprehend how consequences and harm work.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2017 22:02
|
|
|
With all due respect if the issue is "I only skimmed the rulebook and therefore I was confused about the specifics of the rules" that's something that I think you can honestly say the solution to is, without undue harshness, to RTFM. We're not talking about something that's buried in an unrelated section over halfway through the book, and it's not really a failing of layout to have the specifics of harm and consequences given in the early portion of the book dealing with basic mechanics and interactions, under the heading Harm and Consequences. Since the game preaches fiction-first it's also not unreasonable to suggest that someone shouldn't look at "-1d" and go "well I guess in this fiction-first game this is the one particular rule that's completely detached from the fiction and therefore I take a penalty to talking good because of my broken leg."
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 02:56
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:lol if you go into a kickstarter expecting the delivery date to be accurate I mean some people can and do Kickstarters that either hit or, in some rare cases, beat their estimated deadlines but they're pretty much in the minority. In the specific case of John Harper and Blades in the Dark it seems kind of weird to play the "well his game was late by a year" card when he's been steadily revising and revamping the game during that time period which isn't usually what people object to when a Kickstarter goes late as opposed to the more common "drops all communication with everyone, does nothing, makes excuses" approach.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 03:16
|
|
|
homullus posted:The game he is releasing is different from where it started, which is something people object to with Kickstarter. It's really not though. I mean I know where you're going to try to go with this but Blades in the Dark as it stands now is recognizable as a game that sprung from Blades in the Dark as it originally started. This isn't like that video game that was showing off gifs of some Hyper Light Drifter-style fast-paced 2D actiony top down game and then after funding closed said "actually we're going to make a 3D game with a completely different artstyle and gameplay, thanks for the money." Consolidating the skill list, tweaking playbooks, and adjusting how some rules work doesn't constitute some gross bait-and-switch maneuver, and while I'm currently too lazy to go archive digging to check I'm pretty sure that Harper did say that the game as presented in early drafts wasn't 100% set in stone, but nonetheless what was promised was a narrative-driven game of criminal gangs doing crimes in not-Duskwall with clocks and playbooks and an approach that eschews drawn-out planning in favor of simply diving into heists with minimal fuss and that's precisely what was delivered. And this is all without even touching on the fact that a lot of these changes were probably at the very least nudged along by the ongoing open playtesting which he encouraged people to do, so at every step of the way backers were given an avenue to provide Harper with feedback and were regularly provided with updated versions of the game as time went along, meaning that nothing was sprung on anyone out of nowhere and if Harper had decided to go and do something really completely stupid that everybody hated I imagine there would have been a big outcry about it but I don't recall any serious blowups coming out of the Blades G+ or Kickstarter page. There's always going to be a non-zero number of people who are unhappy that a thing changed, but in this particular case I feel confident going on on the limb that says that way more people are at worst neutral and at best positive about the final product.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 03:37
|
|
|
I'm not nearly delusional enough to think I could ever stop people from being annoyed about anything ever but in the grand chronicle of Dumb Kickstarter poo poo, even narrowing the window to Dumb Elfgame Kickstarter poo poo specifically, a game that showed up a year late in a revised but still recognizable format is still pretty low on the tier list. Maybe that says more about how Kickstarter expectations have been lowered by so many projects that have failed so spectacularly that a mere year's delay doesn't strike me as especially onerous but by the time Blades launched it was still pretty much good practices to be okay with the possibility that when you Kickstart something you have no guarantee that you'll actually get what you're putting money down for. I'm out about $150 on the Deck of Legends which has since fallen into a black hole of nothingness, so yeah in my case I feel pretty self-satisfied that I actually got a thing I paid for out of a Kickstarter and the worst I can say about it is "well it was late but not, like, Alas Vegas late."
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 04:56
|
|
|
They also just put out the special edition with an extra city's worth of information just yesterday.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2017 19:45
|
|
|
neonchameleon posted:Are many people hacking Blades in the Dark? Because Blades on the Borderlands will simply not get out of my head until I write it. (And as The Old School Job in Cortex+ said "What is a dungeon crawl but a poorly-planned heist") See I misread this at first and my mind went to the game Tales From the Borderlands instead, which also seems like it should work.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2017 04:35
|
|
|
Doodmons posted:I would recommend Tokyo Nova for all your mecha anime cyberpunk needs, by the way. It's Shadowrun written by crazy Japanese people and it has both mecha anime and cyberpunk coming out of it in spades. Is there an actual English translation of this?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2017 22:11
|
|
|
Planning is fine but really needs to be strictly limited and reined in or it has a tendency to overtake entire game sessions, multiple hours worth, spent agonizing over details and planning for a zillion contingencies. There's a reason that movies, television shows, and books frequently elide over planning, looking in only at the highlights or reducing it to a brief montage, then go back to fill in details later if they need to do so. A rule like "when it's time to start planning a heist set a timer for 15 minutes and you have that much time to make your plans, then you've gotta dive in and go from there" would be one way of going about it, or something like "go around the table and everybody gets to weigh in on one aspect of the heist and their idea for how to deal with it, then after they do so one other person gets to bring up a single complication that might interfere, then pass the spotlight over to someone else."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2017 00:07
|
|
|
Lynx Winters posted:I forgot that I bumped my backer level up to getting a hardcover, but I got mine yesterday. Ha, same. I was like "wait, what did I order...ohhhh right." Yeah, it's pretty nice, and joins my slowly accumulating collection of indie hardcopy RPGs.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2017 04:48
|
|
|
I don't want to add to anyone's anxiety but I added my physical copy through Backerkit and got it like a couple few weeks ago, so if you're concerned you might want to drop John Harper a line.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2017 06:23
|
|
|
Mimir posted:Was he the first guy to do the "little chip at the base of the neck backs up your brain" thing? I think that's in the Culture books too but it might've shown up later. I don't know if he's the first writer to employ the concept, but Eclipse Phase directly borrows the terminology that Morgan uses in Altered Carbon for the tech (cortical stacks).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2018 22:22
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 15:30 |
|
|
The one thing I'm surprised Eclipse Phase never stole was the special alloy knife that creates cyanide compounds in reaction to exposure to blood.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2018 04:32
|
|