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Afterthought 28 - Car Vore has become live and ready. I think the intro might be tuned a little high, so watch your headphones. Otherwise this is a fun one, for some reason the questions were really just clicking for us.
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Mar 22, 2016 04:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:To tease, I have an F&F coming up now that the roughs are finished. And I'll just say there are three things it doesn't have: Tell me it at least has an endless parade of angels and demons.
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Mar 30, 2016 01:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:Hc Svnt Dracones 2: Space Boogaloo? Heh, we got tweeted at by the Hc Svnt Dracones guy a while back asking us to be nice to his book on the show. Truth is if a book is actively in print enough that the author is worried about what our show could do to it then it's too active for us to review, but it was pretty funny.
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Mar 30, 2016 04:39
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7th Sea! on today's System Mastery! With that heady mix of excellent game design and weird rear end in a top hat game designer. This was a really fun one.
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Apr 1, 2016 15:59
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goldjas posted:I figured it was an aprils fool thing about 1/3 the way through or so, although I wouldn't mind hearing an actual review of this system since I have a few friends that play it and know basically nothing about it (except for, as you mention, the infamy of the person who made it). For reals 7th Sea will be the next episode.
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Apr 2, 2016 09:24
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Hey everyone, want some Afterthought? Here's some: Afterthought 29 - Oops, All Plugs!. We brought James from One Shot and Campaign back on the show (secret: he asked to be to plug his new Kickstarter) but hey, he's always good to answer questions, and we love poaching his insanely dedicated fan-art making wiki populating fanbase.
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Apr 5, 2016 06:27
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Hi everyone! Sorry about the April Fool's shenanigans last week, but hey, here's an actual review of 7th Sea in case you wanted to hear our very mixed opinions on the matter.
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Apr 12, 2016 02:57
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Young Freud posted:Never knew that John Wick's ideal world would leave off Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Personally I sort of figured he was leaving the rest of the world for sourcebooks, which is fine (I mean, no one busts on core Rifts for only mentioning that the NGR is governed by a Rahu-Man). I'm really more incensed that the game lacks a proper Caribbean for pirates to pirate around in.
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Apr 12, 2016 03:45
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Just Dan Again posted:If I remember right the D&D version of Rokugan eschewed ronin as a viable option as well. Reading Oriental Adventures as a kid, I wondered what kind of plot gymnastics you would have to pull to get a whole party of people from different clans to work together on the regular. It might have made more sense to have the big clans act as inspiration and backdrop rather than being the core character concepts for PCs. That would probably have made fans of the CCG super mad when they couldn't play their pet factions in tabletop, but scrappy ronin trying to work their way into a clan's good graces sounds like a really fun low-level game to me. It wasn't that bad. It basicaly suggested that ronin should use the fighter or maybe barbarian classes. Since samurai was just a worse fighter(feats on third levels instead of second) with a free magic sword, being a fighter was way more desirable anyway. I read that 3e OA book before ever hearing of L5R, so to me all the Rokugan poo poo contained therein was just a method by which people could intentionally make their game stuffy and boring if they wanted. Every cool thing in the book ended the first paragraph with "these do not exist in Rokugan."
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Apr 12, 2016 07:32
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Our review wasn't really ask that much about Wick the guy anyway, just a few asides. So one of our listeners(and a lurker here), just sent us a microwave sized box containing the following: GURPS Discworld GURPS Hellboy Blue Planet (with Moderators Guide and Fluid Mechanics) Feng Shui Godlike (with Will To Power and some adventures) Ray Wininnger's Underground The Whispering Vault Underworld Kobolds Ate My Baby Nexus: The Whispering City Kult Witch Hunter: the Invisible World King Arthur Pendragon And what I consider to be the Arkenstone of this hoard, Everway. Amazingly we didn't have a single one of these yet. So good.
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Apr 14, 2016 07:43
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Evil Mastermind posted:Today is April 15, 2016. Well I guess it is in Australia.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:49
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Afterthought 30 - Nemesis is live. We've had an interesting discussion over on our site about the concept of "spotlight buys" in the forms of flaws in merit/flaw systems. I've always personally maintained that stuff like nemesis or sidekick as a flaw is inherently just a way to stuff more characters of your own design that need attention from everyone into a game. Not a big deal, but also not something you should get points for. Instead everyone should just be doing it all the time. Anyway, we discuss this for a while and then answer a big pile of questions, including one about the currently elephant in the game store, the whole Emily Garland Wyrd boycott thing. Come, watch us navigate a minefield!
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Apr 19, 2016 05:43
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I can tell you why people made the game we just reviewed! Because it was 1976 and so the options on what to play were limited to D&D, Empire of the Petal Throne, or Mystery Date. That's right, people who didn't guess it already, System Mastery just reviewed Bunnies & Burrows. It's 39 pages of raw carnal doom and ... trying to figure out what to do between random encounter tables.
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Apr 26, 2016 05:42
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We worked extra hard on the Afterthought intro this week, so go listen to it! Otherwise we talk about games that really go outside the regular conventions of RPGs and then answer questions for a long, long time.
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May 3, 2016 05:09
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Hostile V posted:Speaking of Aberrant and Underground and 90s superhero RPGs, I finally managed to get my hands on a series that I've had a passing interest towards on and off throughout the years when I remember it exists: Brave New World. Unfortunately I think my mind had a better executed image than reality but sometime soon I'll be starting with the core book for that. Oh yeah, someone just sent us that. I hadn't seen it yet, I was sort of hoping it was a licensed game.
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May 6, 2016 05:06
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I like the new minigame they built into it where people can argue about Bureaucracy on the forums endlessly.
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May 10, 2016 16:02
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-Includes an utterly worthless CD-Rom full of pregen DMPCs and word files. -Fearless about announcing supplement books in the core rulebook. -Addresses pronoun usage before defensively settling on "he" as the default. -Half-assed incorporation of religious mythology the author is clearly unfamiliar with.
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May 12, 2016 02:21
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Tendales posted:The xdy convention just wasn't widely adopted yet. All random numbers were expressed as ranges, rather than as the dice used to generate them. Best expressed in the old 1e Monster Manuals for sure. Where Selkies show up in a group of 12-30 (6D4+6).
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May 17, 2016 04:30
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We made another Afterthought, this one sure to go down in our own memories (because these things started to blur together way back before we had hit 100+ episodes) as the one with the Rush Limbaugh opening. It's a brief defense of the noble shitfarmer and a bunch of questions on Afterthought 32 - Hiro Protagonist (note, there is no Neal Stephenson stuff).
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May 17, 2016 06:29
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Kavak posted:
Negative plane is designed by an utter lack of anything. Vacuum plane is defined by a lack of specifically air.
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May 18, 2016 21:24
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There were two cool things about the multitude of inner planes. 1. Obsessively memorizing their layout. 2. The rad fortresses villains could build in them, hewn roughly into incongruous asteroids and the corpses of giant elemental monsters in defiance of the local laws of reality.
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May 18, 2016 21:36
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 It's my first ever roleplaying game on today's System Mastery! Jon's too actually, though it's hard to get excited about that. It's Rifts: Part 1!
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May 24, 2016 06:02
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Halloween Jack posted:I read a lot of reviews without providing feedback, and I think a lot of other people do, too. Sometimes people don't have time to follow and comment on everything as it's posted, especially when there's multiple big reviews being posted simultaneously. I also read quietly without commenting much anymore. That said, I find I am way more likely to comment and read if the review I'm reading actually has a fresh take. A few reviews in here (and I'm not pointing fingers) are less of reviews and really more of paraphrasing the entire book, which I'm not against, but I do skip over a lot of that. MollyMetroid posted:I don't think nobody was reading it, I just don't think anyone was commenting on it because it's way easier to wallow in the terribleness of poo poo like Beast than to get into the enthusiasm for something cool. I have also been skipping all the reactions to Beast. I get it already, it's the greasiest poo poo that ever was pooped. Doesn't need to be Friar's Club Roasted every page.
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Jun 4, 2016 01:45
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'm honestly perplexed at how low-level parties are supposed to survive the early portions of Reign of Winter. The review is important, and I read it diligently. The page long rehash of every comment anyone said about Beast previously every time there's a Beast post is the part I tend to skip.
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Jun 4, 2016 05:47
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Ultiville posted:Not in so many words, but it's a primarily social hobby for some and I have met players who genuinely like being able to focus on story and socializing over mechanics. "I hit him" is not my speed but it is the speed of some players. There's no excuse to try to channel those people into the same class every game. Games can be designed with variable complexity for every class or option. Even that weird guy that's there to just socialize (seriously, I've never met this guy, where the hell is he) is going to eventually get bored of playing fighter every game. Halloween Jack posted:To be fair, in the end nobody forced Mike Mearls to make 5e a boring love letter to ENWorld. It's a shame that much better designers receive much less recognition, but that's nothing new. Wait, is 5e the Superman Returns of RPGs?
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Jun 5, 2016 01:10
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Nessus posted:I think this kind of over-simplifies this particular taxonomic role. (And obviously, the guy who just plays D&D to hang with his pals isn't likely to post here in TGD.) I imagine this is more 'the person for whom the appeal of the game is hanging out with his friends, primarily.' Obviously they have preferences and would certainly like to do fun big stuff in the game, but that isn't what puts their butts in the seat. Yeah, the thing that puts their butts in seats is their ability to hang out with their friends for an evening. The game could be a block of wood labeled "Pizza at Mark's House: The Game" and it would cover that market segment. Why advertise, design for, or even worry about that market? Personally, I think the whole "simple class for beginners or less-interested players" thing is an RPG shibboleth. You never see in anywhere else because other game designers know that players who want to play will just learn to. Heck I was just trying to think of examples, and every other industry has better ways to deal with this. Fighting games often have an easy mode that lets players that aren't well-trained still do rad stuff. So like press A for a fireball instead of QCF-P. Turns every character into easy character, and yeah, that market more or less demands it that way. Otherwise your tightly tiered fighting game has 27 good characters and "Guile, for little brothers."
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Jun 5, 2016 02:01
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Whoops, forgot to post this in here on Monday, here's System Mastery's Rifts Part 2 episode. It's a surprisingly straightforward show, as we race to get to the majority of the playable stuff in the core book along with the magic and psionics in there.
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Jun 8, 2016 15:40
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With the world descriptions in the core book the retcons all appear to be in the same flavor of writing out egalitarian multi-racial societies in favor of various factions of white humans with fun to draw robots. I don't think that's a racism thing mind you, I just think the art team was pretty limited early on. Ramon Perez was such a great addition to this staff. theironjef fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 19:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:* A merchant staying at the inn of the town of Silverton will hire the players to slay goblins that have been known to be operating out of an abandoned silver mine north of town, for they have been attacking silver caravans passing through the region. So the players are supposed to immediately kill all these NPCs, right?
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Jun 11, 2016 17:15
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Afterthought 34 is up and stupid. I mean, way worse than usual.
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Jun 14, 2016 03:00
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That definitely took a bit for you to circle around. I think there was a point there was supposed to be music and it just goes to silence and then back to the talk? poo poo, did I leave a silence in there? Dammit. It was probably supposed to be a music cue or something. Also yeah. J.U.N.K.H.E.A.D. rules. He's definitely going in my next game. gradenko_2000 posted:This was supposed to be an Afterthought question but I guess it works well here too: I think the core book does a worse job of selling an adventure idea than basically any other Rifts book. Vampire Kingdoms has a great thing where you sign up with a crazy merc company and fight vampires in little Mexican towns, and Triax puts you in a big war with the Gargoyles, and Atlantis is great for playing as escaped gladiatorial slaves trying to get the hell off the island, etc. The core book though, I've always thought that despite all the psychics and dragons and so on, it basically seems to be trying to sell players on being in the Coalition. Full class writeups and a stronger sense of what the Coalition actually does all day really seems to encourage that players just sign up and go fight Simvans in the hinterlands with some skelebot backup. Also thanks for the intro compliment. I was bored during a work meeting the other day and brainstormed about 30 new ones of which Jon gleefully rejected about 26. Granted, a lot of them were really dumb. I think one was just "Second person POV intro...?"
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Jun 17, 2016 06:32
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Also, what about Jolly Rancher Watermelon soda? Because for me that's the worst soda I've ever tasted. Try it sometime! Let me know how awful you think it is. Because watermelon flavor, amirite?
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System Mastery Time! We're doing Everway this time on System Mastery! This game is pretty neat. It's a huge box set from Wizards of the Coast, containing three books, several hundred little cardboard pictures, and a weird not-quite Tarot deck.  I don't want to get too deep into it here, but character creation in this game is basically amazing. We made a few characters for our Patreon bonus content, and I'm gonna go ahead and share the tools we used to make a character with you here, because they're awesome. 
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Jun 21, 2016 03:57
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That Old Tree posted:Um, excuse me, Elder Scrolls dwarves are dwemer, not dunmer. Gawsh! I sincerely hope someone was fired for that blunder! (I spent the morning frothing because the We Hate Movies guys described street fighter 2 championship edition as the one with four new characters and the bosses are unlocked, while saying super street fighter 2 turbo just doesn't even exist)
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Jun 21, 2016 21:00
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Alien Rope Burn posted:FYI, Everway did have collectible card packs, in case you didn't get your fill of fantasy pin-up art in the main box; just do a search for Everway Companion Collector Cards. My guess is that we have several packs worth, as a lot of the cards have variant color card backs, or weird quest prompts instead of the vision questions, plus we have more than will comfortably fit in the trays the game ships with.
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Jun 22, 2016 14:31
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Oh well poo poo, that's awesome. I'm gonna rip that off and put it on the System Mastery store. Then I'm gonna buy both.
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Jun 23, 2016 15:46
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Count Chocula posted:I've linked this too many times on this forum and elsewhere, but if you want to read an essay on racism in Tolkien and fantasy in general, here's one by a fantasy author who is much better than Tolkien, Michael Moorcock: http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953 Oooh, a Moorcock superfan! You should cover one of the Stormbringer RPGs, or maybe even the edition just called "Elric!" With the exclamation point and everything, like it was a musical.
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Jun 26, 2016 16:01
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SirPhoebos posted:Those were mentioned in the System Mastery review as an entire race of Fu Manchu, right? Our episode should basically be thought of as the last step in a game of telephone. The book we read left us thinking that Pan-Tang is an island of Mings the Merciless but that was based on a blurb and some art. We've never read any Moorcock.
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Jun 27, 2016 21:19
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So we put an Afterthought episode out on Monday, and it included the listener question of "What's the dumbest thing in RPGs you see people arguing about?" I went with people arguing over fictional characters alignments. Jon went for the jugular and said "people arguing over what HP represents." We both agreed that it's a bullshit argument that no one should care about anymore. It's gone on long enough. The answer depends on the players and the edition, etc. Whatever. So far the comment thread argument about what HP is is the largest bulk of comments we've ever had. Of course.
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Jun 30, 2016 06:41
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Night10194 posted:I see someone's never seen the XP55 Ascender. Well, the Ascender is a little basic, yeah. But it's cool, because we had the Flying Ram.  The XP-79B here has a silly sounding name, until you realize it's just literal. The Flying Ram had a superhard magnesium leading edge along its wings, and was designed to fly through enemy airplanes, to cut off their wings and tail surfaces. Also the pilot is lying down in there. I've always wanted to do a weird war game using all the ludicrous theoretical airframes from the end of the war. That german swing-swing design where instead of folding back, the wings just rotate 45 degrees along a central axis, the Triebflugl, the bombers with gunner pods mounted on the wingtips, that asymmetrical Blohm and Voss BV141, there was just so much cool stuff. Maybe mix in a little mysticism with that Nazi secret bell thing and the spear of Longinus, whatever. Just such a great setting. WW2, 1947. theironjef fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Jul 2, 2016 |
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Jul 2, 2016 00:52
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Wouldn't it just be a hippogryphon?
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Jul 6, 2016 05:04
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