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LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Robindaybird posted:

Not just nerds, Hollywood sure loves romanticizing the Noble Rebels, while side-stepping the fact it's really all about the right to keep slaves. Let's put it this way, if you know a little about the Civil War, it's about slavery, if you know more, it's State Rights, but if you really dig in and read up, it's really about the right to own slaves.

As an example of Hollywood/Hollywood people loving to romanticize the Nobel Rebels: Joss Whedon's Firefly has some pretty heavy undertones of Confederate appologism. Like, it's a cool show, but Mal Reynolds spends the entire show with "The SouthBrowncoats Will Rise Again" metaphorically embroidered on his shirt.

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LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

The Night's Black Agents writeup has given me some ideas for my conspiratorical, paranoid Delta Green-with-some-Vampire: the Masquerade campaign. Human trafficking of cult-and-vampire victims through Eastern Europe, using the conspyramid as a tool, and that thing someone suggested of MI6PISCES trying to use vampires as a tool in the War on Terror all seems to fit so well with Delta Green.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kurieg posted:

I’m going to need more alcohol for this.

If you don't mind, I'll be adding some commentary based on a review of this I'm doing at another website.

Kurieg posted:

Typos lovingly preserved for your enjoyment Gomexies?

"Gomez" and "Mexies". As a friend of mine pointed out, "well, rural places CAN be pretty loving terrible, but i mean yeah seriously open racism like that is not publically in vogue even in the backassest of the US". It's also so... shallow in its portrayal. Like trying to talk about the pervasiveness of racism in modern society and constantly mentioning the KKK, rather than white flight, income inequality, insidious everyday racism, microaggressions, counting coins on the counter, and a police forces that arrests people for being black in the wrong neighbourhoods. Instead, it's open use of racial slurs all day every day.


Kurieg posted:

quote:

Like many a small town Saturday night is either football in the fall or party night for the teens at the lake. The lake is where a sad chubby little girl named Tammy Winters was raped twice, once at age fifteen and one again at age sixteen.

But don’t worry about Tammy, because according to the people of Digahol, Tammy got what she had coming.

Her family the Winters were farmers, they were struggling but not poor. Her father was a former local football star, her mother a respected lady who was always willing to help her neighbors and her five brothers, great athletes, popular and handsome. Tammy, the only daughter and the fifth to be born was different. She was short, dumpy, wore glasses, listened to friend of the family and devil music and was cursed with the one thing population of Diaghol could not tolerate, intelligence.

Being smart wasn’t easy for a girl in a town where the internet could be found in only two places, the school library, the local library, where cell phone service was so spotty most people just had land lines and where any technology created after the microwave oven was seen as “New Fangled”. Yes, so amidst, a town full of racist, god-fearing luddites was born a girl who would have graduated from high school at the age of thirteen if the Digahol Iowa school system had bothered creating a gifted student program. Instead she was forced to sit in class bored and berated from the ages of five to sixteen.

Now, while tammy was pretty much persona-non grata among her peers, she was loved by her family, protected by her brothers and cherished by her spinster aunt who encouraged Tammy to be Tammy.. However, being a girl, who outsiders treated like trash can warp a person and as smart as she was, the fifth child of the Winters didn’t exactly treat her family well, especially as a teenager. Hate and hormones turned her into a self destructive rebel. She slept with boys who despised, drunk to much, did drugs, screamed a lot and thought cutting herself was a worthy pastime.

Still despite being a what she was and acting out how she saw fit she knew Digahol was not for her and the day after graduating first in her class and being denied a valedictorian speech she left Diaghol swearing to never return.

OK, so first of all, this is a feminist RPG. How out of touch are the authors with feminism? Well, they're using rape for shock value, and there's no trigger warning. And woe betide Tammy, the white girl! She's smart and not conventionally pretty - truly, she is an excellent vehicle for viewing what sexism in modern-day America looks like. She faces so much oppression, like not being allowed into a gifted student's program! Won't you weep for Tammy and how she didn't get to hold the valedictorian speech? And, Lethe, this line:

quote:

She [...] was cursed with the one thing population of Diaghol could not tolerate, intelligence.

Quoth a friend of mine: Sure, Tammy. You live in a town that apparently refers to its lone black family as "the friend of the family-Johnsons", and you're going to whine about how the one thing they can't tolerate is intelligence.

Kurieg posted:

quote:

She.. It… was Circe, tall perfect, voice like honey and eyes as green as the sea. She told me I was special and that she had heard my prayers. That I was being tested before being tapped for the most important mission of all. I was to be her priestess and that the world that I knew, it’s history and it’s present were a lie created by a creature she called “The Old Garden Snake”.

<snip>

I thought when I woke up I would be a supermodel, but you see the idea of the supermodel is a lie of the snake, physical beauty and perfection comes in all shapes and sizes.

Pictured: Circe (NSFW!)

"Physical beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, but all good people happen to look like supermodels."


Kurieg posted:

quote:

So it came to the surprise of no one when Selene found herself on the run after spray painting “Pigs” on multiple police cruisers. That after being arrested, she was handcuffed and beaten, but instead of taking the beating Selene grabbed the gun of a careless Policeman and shot her attackers and killed four policemen before being tasered, beaten and shot herself.

Less than a year later she was on death row. The laws of humans and the will of the Goddesshead are not the same. Poverty, hopelessness and brutality had turned Selene into what she was, she was the victim of the society of and when she saw no other way out like me she had made up her mind to die. This time however she took four men with her who upon research turned out to be known for their brutal tactics and case after case of suspects dying during arrest. Thus any sympathy I had for them vanished. Further investigation revealed the men were members of the ultra right wing snake backed “truthkeeper’ organization and that “Black Viper” was in charge of training the police to deal with “borderer incursions”.

“You know what we need, an acceptable target. No we need a more acceptable target. No it isn’t obvious enough who we’re referencing!”

The four people Selene killed just happen to also be members of a secret organization of ultra-right-wing Patriarchy-followers, because real-world police brutality against people of colour is actually caused by an evil god, and feminism and civil rights has nothing to do with addressing systematic discrimination caused by human failures - just punch The Man in the face. These police were already described as beating up a handcuffed girl, then tasering her, beating her up, and shooting her. This is extreme police brutality, and exactly the kind of thing a game about radical politics and fighting against the establishment should address... but the author still feels the need to make the police members of an ultra-right-wing conspiracy. It's so... dishonest.

And, you know, thank god they just happened to be bad people. We couldn't have our heroines killing someone good by accident or in anger!

Also, this picture of Minerva Sue?



Here's two photos of Abby Soto herself, to fill up the Mary Sue Bingo card. Note that, as drawn, Minerva is more "supermodel" and less "Velma cosplayer". Note the smoking with a cigarette holder; Soto draws this on everyone, including 12-year-old-girls, because lady has a serious smoking fetish.

And, hey, I'll comment some on that dedication too, if you don't mind me usurping your entire review:



It's so oddly dedicated to feminist activists and women persecuted for being smart or breaking sexual norms, but not victims of women-targeting racial prejudice or victims of sexism in general. You'd think that a feminist role-playing game would celebrate the victims of sexism, but nope, the only people deserving recognition are the activists, the lesbians, and the smart girls.

Kurieg posted:

Right so.. a summary. In the beginning women ruled the world (as was right) because mankind still revered the earth and the Goddesshead. This universal time known as the “Pax Majestrix”(Peace of the Great Woman) came to an end 5000 years ago when Cain(yes, that cain, apparently) made a deal with a being of discord and destruction known as Rex Anguis (The Snake King). Cain freed the Snake and it engaged the Goddesshead in a stalemate battle and the power of the Maga weakened as the Goddesshead used it to try and cage the serpent which was feeding off of mankind;s “war, greed, intolerance and ignorance”.

The Maga thought they were abandoned and either killed themselves so their power could return to the Goddesshead, or went into hiding. “Man” in this time villified the Maga, turning them into the “dark sorceress, the evil queen and the deomoness.” until Maga faded into myth. But then a girl was burned at the stake in Nebraska(I’m still confused as to why) and there was a nationwide outrage of women which weakened the Serpent and empowered the Goddesshead to create more Maga.

OK, the most hillarious part of this backstory? Caine was jealous of the women having more power than men; Caine was jealous of all the magical power the Circe gave to women but not men and rebelled, which tells us that the real issue at hand here are the thousands of years of discrimination that men faced at the hands of Circe. In fact, the last five thousand years of Patriarchy cannot be seen as traditional oppression by the powerful. Rather, Patriarchy is the lashing out of an abused and impoverished group, and the witches who worship Circe are reactionaries trying to regain their own position of superiority.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kurieg posted:

Right, my initial reading of it was the one that gave her statement a "drastic misunderstanding of trans terminlogy and reasons for transitioning" vibe rather than "hateful TERFy bullshit" vibe. So sort of my fault but also gently caress Soto sideways.

Covok posted:

Generally, Trans Man refers to a Designated Female At Birth who transitioned and vice versa.

One particular thing to keep in mind when talking about what people expressing various amounts of ignorance and transphobia mean is that they're often completely ignorant of the terminology in the first place. Soto writes "transgendered man", which either means a trans woman (because Soto views transwomen as men, so transwomen are transgendered "men"), or means trans man (because Soto actually means what she's written). In any case, it's not exactly in vogue among trans people to call them "transgendered" anyway, but it's not like Soto has done any research for the other parts of this pile of poo poo anyway.

The fact that the text talks about the transgender character being able to change back to their "fully functioning male form" (and the fact that trans women are more prominent in the public consciousness) makes me suspect that Soto in fact means playing a trans woman. But then trying to make sense of this text is an exercise in futility in the first place...

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kurieg posted:

Ariadnian

Cybermancy: Ariadnian can spend a mana to control any piece of technology with a circuit board. She can also see and decode wireless signals and increase their strength or shut them down entirely.

You mean "any circuit bored in her line of site". :goonsay:

Kurieg posted:

Imbue Technology:Aradnians can enchant items with mana allowing them to cast gifts. (Including healing gifts that activate when the maga falls "uncurious") This is, however, broken, because to imbue an item you need to pay it's full mana cost+1, but after that you can recharge it for just a single mana point. I shouldn't need to point out that is broken.

First, They can imbue technological items with magical spells that go off when the item is used, which raises the question of how you can activate the item when you fall unconscious uncurious. They can "set the perimeters on one the gift activates.", revealing that Soto has managed to spell "when" as "one", making me wonder if she's actually writing this thing with speech-to-text software.

Kurieg posted:

Domina
These are the black mages, more or less.

All Dominas are "Bossy and confident to the point of arrogance they wield magic with the sadist glee of a pyromaniac with a blowtorch.", because when you pick your splat, you should also be forced into a narrow stereotype of a personality, in true World of Darkness fashion.

Kurieg posted:

Furie
The more traditional combat/protector maga.

Starting Attributes: Might 3 Agi 3 Fitness 3 Brains 2 Allure 2 Resolve 2 Spirit 2 Luck 1.
Starting Knowledge: Arcane, Athletics, Battle, Magic, and Survival
Starting Talents:
Amazon Fury: Furies can spend a power point to ignore minuses to rolls due to lost health as long as those rolls involve combat, no duration given for this ability however.

Arcane Athlete: Furies an spend a mana point to buff their agility, stamina, or might by 2 for 1 minute, and they can have 2 or 3 stats buffed at once.

The Call: Furies can spend a point of mana to find someone in imminent danger in a 1 mile radius, or to know if someone that they're sworn to protect is in danger.

Gladius: Furies can make a Magical melee weapon or longbow (chosen at character creation) that ignores all non-magical armor and deals +2 dice of damage for one point of Mana.

Unlike the combat-focused Domina, the Furie is combat-focused. Also, note that their abilities have absolutely no other use than combat. If you play a Furie, all your powers are based on fighting, so I guess you'll just sit around doing nothing when there's nothing to fight (or cast magic, I guess?)

Kurieg posted:

Harpy
Broom Jockies (Cigar/cigarette count 3)

Sure... Flight is usually unbalancing in a game unless everyone has it or no one has it, so i'm not sure how this is going to work in a game.

And they can do nothing else. That's their niche. Flying.

Kurieg posted:

Priestess
The priestesses of the various facets of the Godesshead, the nominal leaders of the Maga.

Avatar of the Goddesshead: Priestesses can spend a mana point either to get a free 1 dice amp to a gift (We'll go over those later) or get +2 to Allure or Brains for 1 minutes

Do you think it's a coincidence that Minerva's Path is probably the most powerful one? I mean, +1 amp to any spell for mana and +2 to an Attribute it far, far more useful that what most other Paths get, like "+2 to art".

Kurieg posted:

Favorite Daughter:Priestesses can ignore one action a day that would normally have them lose favor.

In other words, because you're a priestess you're held to a lower standard and can get away with being a total oval office because the Goddesshead applies unfair standards. Clearly, the Patriarchy's rebellion against the corrupt and oppressive Goddesshead is further justified.

Kurieg posted:

Regina
Ancient Witches that have been living for hundreds of years already. (cigarette count 4)

Life Ward: The Regina ignores one dice of magic damage and two dice of normal damage, and gains an extra dice to resist death.

Riches of the Ages: Reginas start with 3 dots in Lifestyle due to dead ex-lovers, shrewd investments, and "perhaps taxing peasants".

Wisdom of the Ages: Reginas start with 5 extra knowledge points to distribute up to the maximum starting value of 5

Unlike the rest of the Paths, Reginas actually don't have any special magical abilities. Every benefit they have comes from having lived a long life. Also note that one way they can have gained all this money is through "taxing peasants", which gives of a weird classist undertone that in the feminist revolution, it's totally OK to steal money from the poor, as long as you're a woman when you do it. :ussr:

Kurieg posted:

Succubus
Oh...oh..

So, Succubi aren't specifically all about Sexin people to death.

No, but as the text notes, they all like sexing other people to death. Let's see, what other notes did I make about the Succubi? Ah, yes:

"I guess this is an attempt at reclaiming negative portrayals, but I feel it undermines the revolutionary aspect here, especially when taken together with all the other stuff. Conventional standards of beauty are a lie of the Patriarchy, but Circe looks like [previously linked picture] and Selena is conventionally cute with washboard abs. The Patriarchy has waged a war against women, but cannibalistic Succubi who need to drain people's life, often through sex? Actually a thing."

It's also worth noting that the text says Succubi have to drain people, but there's no mechanical enforcement of this. As they can fly without a brooms and carpets, they're also pretty much a huge gently caress-you to Harpies, since they can do what Harpies do about as well and get more abilities. They get thralls, because feminism is perfectly fine with using your sexuality to turn people into slaves. It's like Soto has learned what feminism is about from SubmissiveMenWhoLoveFemdom.com.

Kurieg posted:

Knowledge
The first line in the paragraph is "Knowledges are skills" then refer to them only as skills from then on.
Contested rolls have both of you roll dice, more successes win, uncontested skill rolls use the following chart and the DM's adjucation.

Two things:

One, the game makes you roll for leaping over small logs. Two, it takes four successes to jump a fence. I didn't bother learning the critical rule, but I think that's incidental to the fact that you basically need eight dice to jump a fence consistently.

Kurieg posted:

Domestic Uhh..

The gently caress? Why is this in your "RAWR WOMYN" game? Correction: why does this need to be in any game? These things are unlikely to come up unless you really really want them to come up.

Well, it's been a tenet of Third Wave Feminism that it's no good to demonize the traditionally feminine, and that traditionally female work should not be denigrated or considered "lesser" than traditionally male jobs. Hence there's nothing particularly wrong with including a Housekeeping ability, since Housekeeping is difficult and valuable (but undervalued) work. You could totally write a microRPG about feminism that is crushing brutal is traditionally feminine work is not valued, and teach that Housekeeping is an important aspect of living a good life for men and women alike.

That is not this game.

Lethe, my feminisms are rustled. Can we get a "crying de Beauvoir" smiley?

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kurieg posted:

"Traditional combat"-focused is what I mean. Domina's about combat magic, Furie's about beating people to death with magic swords.

Oh, I wasn't critiquing an oversight - just noting to people who are fortunate enough to have never read this thing that there's significant overlap in niches. Which isn't always a bad thing, but it's strange when most niches don't overlap and some suddenly do. Like, if you were to describe these Paths, it's "well this one fights really good, and this one fights really good with a dominatrix theme".

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Adnachiel posted:

Soto and Harris seem to love taking ideas from each other.

That's because characters like Circe, Minerva, etc. aren't originally made for the RPGs. The versions in the tabletop RPGs are just adapted from their online fetish collaborative writing/freeform roleplaying/whatever world.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

In between the NBA review here, the imminent release of the Delta Green RPG, and playing through Raven Shield over the Christmas Holidays, I've really wanted to get my Phoenix Command retroclone/houserules++ to the point where I can run a game of Delta Green: Raven Shield...

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

gradenko_2000 posted:

Speaking of Phoenix Command, I tried to do a write-up of Sword's Path Glory, and that just broke me. I got all the way to the Shock tables before I gave up. You are a more steely man than I.

Girl.

Sword's Path Glory is... like, you know how in computer fighting games your moves are timing-based with animation-cancelling windows? SPG is like that, but in paper form. It's not even particularly difficult, it's just something of a chore to do all the math and tick-counting you need to do to play it. (I've never actually tried playing it, but I can tell how it works from the rules.) Like, in attempting to make a retroclone of PCCS, the very first step I took was to get rid of all the multiplication, because multiplying all damage by 10/HLT whenever someone gets shot is just a chore. SPG gleefully expects you to perform all that multiplication, and more!

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

gradenko_2000 posted:

You know what else needs you to roll 30 on a roll of d20?



That's right, the long jump rules from the D&D 3rd Edition Player's Handbook.

Two systems both topping out at a 30 feet jump being the most difficult, at DC 30, could just be a coincidence. However, I'd note that the "Immediate Run" jump distances are exactly half the "Short Run" jump distances - mathematically equivalent to the PHB 3e rule that having less than 20 feet of running before the jump doubles DCs. Is the Cypher/Numerana rule for "Short Run" that it has to be at least 20 feet long?

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Asimo posted:

It's probably partly how horrible and blatant the fetishes are, the complete inability to any sort of thematic or moral consistency, and the utter inability for the authors to realize either of these problems. It's the sort of insanity combo you usually only find on creepy deviantart galleries or the like.

Witch Girl Adventures is basically Abby Soto's DeviantArt gallery turned into an RPG.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Bieeardo posted:

I can't believe I'm actually typing this, but would smoking Circe actually kill her? I'm assuming that the mundanes are ash, but her reaction to returning to human form with her hips turned into one of RPGpundit's siglines seems more 'ugh! you little bitch!' than 'OH MY GOD WHERE'S THE REST OF ME?!'

Well, the Abby Soto game Bellum Maga has actual rules for what happens when you turn someone into a cigarette and smoke them, if you're really curious...

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

With Princess: the Hopeful, it's not really surprising that it was dark. It was an attempt at creating a Magical Girl fangame for the World of Darkness, which meant there was a push by several of its contributors to make it tonally appropriate for the new World of Darkness, than to emulate the genre of magical girl animated series. It's then rather unsurprising that Sparks is much the same, since it seems like it was created either to be a game divorced from the WoD license or because of some schism between authors over some detail (which happened several times on Princess; for example, whether the tone should be WoD-esque fatalism or about rejecting the WoD-esque fatalism.)

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011



Chapter 10: The Book of Magick: Part I: Casting Magick

M20 posted:

The ultimate irony of the Ascension War is that everyone’s basically doing the same thing, yet they’re killing one another over their impression of how and why they do it.
If you don't believe in Chaos Magick, you're an idiot.

To cast magick in M20, you need to answer four questions:

M20 posted:

What do I WANT to do, and HOW will I do it?
Can I use what I KNOW to get what I WANT?
Did I succeed or not? And…
What happens either way?

Five questions. Five questions, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Six questions...

Magick in Mage works by a series of rules (that are universal, and a close approximation to how the metaphysical rules of MTAs works) that are based on the mage's ability to capital-W Will things as they please. How they Will things is, otherwise, arbitrary (except for all those focus rules you need to follow). To wit:

M20 posted:

That’s true even for the simplest Rank 1 perception Effects. You could have three Virtual Adepts using the same Effect in three different ways: one might activate a scanning app on his cell phone; the second could close her eyes, do some three-part yoga breathing, and extend her senses outward; and the third takes a few hits off a joint, open his eyes and sees deeper than the usual levels of human perception.
Paradigm? What's that? Nah, you might believe that the entire world is a computer simulation, but marijuana and yoga are how you cast magick.

OK, so you want to cast magick. So you answer the five questions, which involves a four-step process:

M20 posted:

Step One – Effect: Based on your character’s abilities and needs, decide what you want to do and how you want to do it. This is called the Effect: the thing you want to accomplish with your magick.

Step Two – Ability: Based on your mage’s focus and Spheres, figure out if you can create the Effect you want to create… and if so, how your character will make it happen in story terms.

Step Three – Roll: Roll one die for every dot in your Arete Trait. The difficulty depends upon the Effect you’re trying to use; whether it’s vulgar or coincidental; and whether or not someone’s watching you.

Step Four – Results: The number of successes that you roll determines whether or not you succeed. If you fall short of your goal, you may roll again on subsequent turns in order to get more successes. (See Rituals, Rolls,
and Extended Successes, pp. 538-542.) If you fail, the Effect fizzles out. And if you botch, bad things happen.
Step 1 and Step 2 are the same...

That's all there is to casting magick: You need to go through a fourthree-step process to answer fourfive questions.

After an explanation of Paradox, there's many many pages of tables and charts for casting magick with MTAs' freeform magick system. And the charts are... something. The tables for determining the Arete roll to succeed and the Paradox effects are perfectly adequate (and unlike certain earlier MTAs books, are not positioned at an oblique angle to the page, thankfully). Exactly how to determine the number of successes necessary to accomplish something with magick is somewhat difficult, since it uses a table of examples. And perhaps it's just my borderline autism speaking[1], but I've never really found examples and descriptions to be good guidelines for determining other things; 5-10 successes are necessary to create simple life-forms[2], blowing up buildings, summoning Otherworldly creatures, having absolute control of a mob of people... but what can I do with Time magick at 5-10 successes? Entropy? Prime? For that matter, how big is the mob in question? It's somewhere between 2 and 200 people, but no further guidance is given.

The problem with using inexact language to describe in-game effects is that it easily creates a situation where two people have different opinions on what something means. To Alice, "a mob" is about 12 people. To Bob, it's about 70. So when Bob reads in the rules that he can command 70-ish people, he comes across a situation where he thinks "right now, I'm going to use my magick to command as many as possible in this group of 100 people". Then Bob's ST Alice sees Bob roll 10 successes and says "you now command 12 of them". And this is a lovely situation to place Alice and Bob in, because Bob feels disappointed and Alice can't really go back on it. Well, she could, but Alice knew that Bob could mind-control 12 people and made the group number 100; if she knew Bob could mind-control 70, she might have made the group number 550 people. Besides, having to do this negotiation over every single power that's ambiguously described takes a lot of time.

Yes, Alice, Bob, and their friends could all sit down ahead of time and work out exactly how many people 10 successes can mind-control, but a) that's what the 700-page book on playing MTAs is for, and b) the book makes no indication that they should do this.

[1] I can cry about ableism though, right?
[2] And what is a "simple" life-form, and what distinguishes it from a complex life-form? Is there a standard for this? Do I have to count base-pairs in their genome? Distinct organs? How often they're used to "disprove" evolution on creationist talkshows?

There's a table of difficulty modifiers, and a "personalized instrument" and a "unique instrument" each add -1 Difficulty. So far OK. An "unfamiliar instrument" gives "+2/+1" to the Difficulty, which I'm supposed to interpret how? A personal item from the target gives "-1 to -3" (note the inconsistent notation between unfamiliar instruments and personal items), with no further elaboration. And then there's this note at the bottom:

M20 posted:

Minimum difficulty 3, maximum difficulty 10. If you employ the Thresholds option, max difficulty is 9; in the latter case, extra modifiers add to threshold, requiring one additional success per +1 difficulty modifier.

Modifiers that would take the difficulty above 10 add additional successes at a one-to-one ratio; a +3 modifier to difficulty 10, for example, would demand at least three successes.

If you use both the threshold option and modifiers that take the difficulty above 10, then each additional +1 difficulty over 9 demands an extra success. A +3 modifier to difficulty 9 would require at least three successes.
If you don't remember what Thresholds are, don't worry, there are no pointers to which page said rule is written up on here.

First, I wish to note the irony that while the Threshold is presented as an optional rule, the rules for magick need to write up a functionally near-identical version of it anyway, to let difficulties increase beyond 10. You might remember that this is the same thing that happened with the core rules anyway, where Degrees of Success are already a thing. Then, additionally, the third line repeats the latter half of line one for no reason; that +1 difficulty increases the required Degrees of Success by +1. Good job, Lindsay Woodstock! It's also somewhat interesting to note that Degrees of Success are used for two things. First, DoS is used to determine whether you can accomplish your magickal effect. Further, DoS is used to account for Difficulties higher than 10. However, if Difficulty is higher than 10 and you're casting something with a high DoS, the required DoS is not increased.

For example, if you have Difficulty 8 and a minimum DoS of 3, it's pretty hard. If you have a Difficulty 10 and a minimum DoS of 3, it's extremely hard. If you have a Difficulty 13 and a Minimum DoS of 3, it's not harder than when Difficulty was 10, because you needed 3 successes anyway. Not that it really matters when the difficulties are so high anyway, but it makes for a strange edge case.

Using Correspondence gives a minimum Degrees of Success based on how far away, or how familiar, you are with the thing. The "Range" tables goes, in increasing order:

M20 posted:

1: Line of Sight
2: Very familiar
3: Familiar
4: Visited once
5: Described location
6: Anywhere on Earth

I realize that in M20, physical or geometrical concepts of "range" are arbitrary illusions, but I still baulk at "Very familiar" and "Visited once" being used to describe distances. (And, again, how am borderline autistic me supposed to discern between "Familiar" and "Very familiar"?)

Damage follows a progression of:

M20 posted:

1: None
2: Two levels
3: Six levels
4: Eight levels
5: Ten levels
6+: Number of Successes x 2
I again note that they use an actual "X" and not a multiplication sign. Bad form.

Mind can usually only cause Bashing damage. Most other spheres cause Lethal. Vulgar Entropy, Life, and Prime can cause Aggravated damage. Prime 2 and a point of Quintessence can let any magickal attack cause Aggravated damage. Time and Correspondence can't cause damage by themselves. Forces gets, effectively, +1 successes when successfully cast, and can deal Aggravated with fire and electricity. Hint: buy Forces.

There's an optional rule that lets you spend excess successes on an Arete roll to get bonus effects. These effects are, notably, more powerful on a per-success basis than the regular effects they replicate. For example, excess successes can be traded for damage at a 1:2 basis, which means that a 2-successes damaging spell does 2 damage, while a 2-successes 1-success not-damage spell does it's usual effect and 2 damage. I think. It says "additional damage", but the rules for using spells to cause harm already specify what additional dice can do, so what's the point? The same applies to duration; spending 1 success to increase duration gives the same effect as 2 successes on a spell rated in terms of duration.

And now my favourite part of the tables; the "I Disbelieve!"-table, which I will quote in it's entirety:

M20 posted:

Believability Difficulty
No loving way! 3
Hard to swallow 4
Implausible 5
Possible 6
Probable 7
Likely 8
Too damned likely! 9

In addition to the usual problems I have with holistic descriptions like this, "probable" and "likely" mean the exact same thing. They're synonyms. Probable is "likely to occur or prove true", while Likely is "probably or apparently destined". Unless you use the definition that has "likely" as "very probable" but I feel the fact that these definitions are not consistent only underlines my point. This table is useless and something inside me dies a little every time I see it.

Similar problems plague the table for determining how powerful magickal illusions are; at three successes you can affect three senses. At four successes, you can affect several senses. At five successes, you can affect multiple senses. At six, the illusion gives "full sensations". Now, tell me, how many senses are included in "several", and is it a different number from the ones in "multiple"? I can guess that it's supposed to be more than two, implicitly (but it would be nice if they hadn't used words that just mean "more than one"...), but it's no help to ST or player. This goes back to my example with Alice and Bob; Bob thinks that his 4-success illusion affects about 5 senses; sight, hearing, touch, smell, and balance, while forgoing the less useful ones like taste, nociception, thermoception, and propriception. Alice meanwhile thinks that "full sensations" is supposed to mean the five traditional senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell), and says that 5 senses is way too much for a mere 4 successes. All of this could have been avoided if old-school White Wolf authors didn't have a crippling phobia of hard numbers.

And you can age people too! Depending on your number of successes, the ageing is "minor", "noticeable", "severe", "to decrepitude", and "to bring of destruction". Now, since it's only at the second level that the ageing becomes noticeable, and "minor aging" is 3 successes, 3 successes of Time magick has basically no effect.

Now, Paradox! The Paradox effects are a glorious mess.

Whenever you acquire 5 or more Paradox on a single roll, you cause a Paradox Backlash. When you trigger a Paradox Backlash, you roll your Paradox rating as a pool. Each success means you lose a dot of Paradox. However, fancy effects happen when you discharge Paradox this way:
Successes: Effect
1-5: 1 level of Bashing damage per success and a Trivial Paradox Flaw
6-10: 1B/success or a Minor Paradox Flaw
11-15: Pick one: 1L/success, Significant Paradox Flaw, Paradox Spirit visitation, or Mild Quiet.
16-20: 1L/success and 1 permanent Paradoxor Pick two: Severe Paradox Flaw; Paradox Spirit visitation, Moderate Quiet, or banishment to a Paradox Realm (Is that damage and either a Paradox flaw or two effects from the list, or either damage and flaw or two effects from the list? :iiam:)
20+: 1A/2 successes and pick one: 2 permanent Paradox, Drastic Paradox Flaw, Paradox Spirit visitation, severe Quiet, or banishment to a Paradox Realm

It really annoys me how inconsistent it is; at 1-5 successes, you get damage and a Paradox Flaw, while at higher levels it tends to be damage or a Paradox Flaw or some other effect. Now, speaking of those other effects, at 11-15 successes, you can get a mild Quiet. Checking the adjacent Quiet table, 11-15 successes on the Paradox roll is a Level 4 quiet, described as "Mage either gets trapped in a mindscape of his own design, or else behaves so irrationally that he becomes a danger to himself and everyone nearby.", including "Deadly fanaticism", Mindscape or constant hobgoblins", or "Violent sociopathy".

Mild.

Oh, and Severe Quiet? That's Level 6 and says "Mage goes Marauder and becomes a Storyteller character."

Anyway, Mages can sometimes see auras. This is useful for a number of reasons; you can always tell what mood someone are in, and it also allows the easy identification of other supernatural creatures; Faeries have rainbow-coloured auras, Vampires have pale auras, the ghosts have faded auras, the sick and dying have fading auras, werecreatures have bright and vibrant auras, and I can't tell what Nephandi auras are like because it looks like Brucato has ejaculated onto the page; instead of a sensible entry, it says "Wouldn’t you like to know?". :jerkbag: What, has nobody seen a nephandi and lived to tell about it? If nephandi auras are distinct, then surely it would be noticeable what their auras are like? And if nephandi auras look like any other mage's, then wouldn't mages know that you can't tell who is a nephandi? AND IF I'M THE loving ST, WOULDN'T IT BE REALLY USEFUL TO KNOW WHAT MY PLAYERS SEE WHEN THEY LOOK AT A NEPHANDI WITH AURA-SIGHT?

"I look at him with my aura sight. What colour is his aura."
"Uh... 'Wouldn't you like to know?'"
"I would. That's why I'm looking at him with my aura sight. What's his colour?"
"No, seriously, that's what it says: 'Wouldn't you like to know?'"
"Oh, so he's a Nephandi. Right. I blast him with Forces, Prime, and 4 dots of Quintessence."

The last part of this chapter is 2.5 pages of common magical effects and the necessary sphere ratings to cast such magick. Useful, but it's sorted not by the Sphere necessary, but by what the effect is. There's a list of Body Magick feats, including Matter, Life, Prime, and Time effects. Which is great if you need to know how to do something, or if you have almost all the spheres, but if you have only a few spheres, it means you have to look through every single table on those 2.5 pages to learn what you can do. If the feats had been sorted by sphere, it would be easier to just look up your own spheres to see if you can do something.

Argh, this book. It's so bad and Brucato is a smug wanker who can't write rules to save his life.

Next: Part II: The Spheres

LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Mar 28, 2016

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nessus posted:

I suspect Brucato's point was "a Nephandus will almost certainly not give casual tells with anything like the sort of reliability that would let you use Detect Evil." It would be extra helpful if there were simple spells available for casual use which would mess with your aura, because then he doesn't even have to explain it: "Hm, that guy might possibly have Spirit or Prime 1."

Maybe. But then I think it'd have been more useful if instead of "Wouldn't you like to know?", it had read "Like any other mage" or "Masked to look like a regular mage" or something like that, instead of forcing me to speculate while being incredibly smug about it.

Count Chocula posted:

Or instead of describing a color you're meant to describe an unknowable feeling of wrongness that can't be bound into one color?

The words for the colour "an unknowable feeling of wrongness that can't be bound into one color" in the English language are "an unknowable feeling of wrongness that can't be bound into one color", not "Wouldn't you like to know?"

Count Chocula posted:

Have you read any Terrance McKenna? Some people believe that drugs enable you to access the realm of reality where the Machine Elves program it (think the Pattern Spiders). Or maybe it just lets you see the source code of the universe, like I'm The Matrix.

MTAs is based on a tradition of New Age syncreticism and being ultimately rooted in Chaos Magick it is only natural that someone can have a magickal paradigm that's a shopping list of different real-world beliefs. I still think it's silly how uninterested and little invested the example characters are in their paradigms, because my understanding of MTAs (from before M20 came out) is one where paradigms are central to what a Tradition is. The Virtual Adepts, definitionally, are not mages who use yoga or marijuana to cast spells. In fact, let me quote from the opening pages of Virtual Adepts (1e):

Virtual Adepts posted:

We're a group of mages who have specific ideas concerning reality. Through these ideas, we can mold reality to our every whim. Our model for reality is the world we can create with computers and electronics. We can apply this type of analogy to the real world, effecting changes that most people deem impossible. Not all Virtual Adepts use computers. Some use pocket calculators. I've even heard of some who model reality on the programming of VCRs.

Here's what it has to say about the Virtual Adepts and computers:

Virtual Adepts posted:

They usually spend extravagant amounts of time, effort, and money in order to maintain and perfect their machine[personal computer]. Each Adept's computer is unique, often unusable by anybody but the Adept who programmed it. If an Adept is truly elite, as they say, he can use any computer in existence.

Every single sample character uses some kind of computer. The one most removed from using a computer to do magick is hugely into making MIDI music on an Amiga. I don't really think breathing-exercises and being drugged to their eyeballs makes for good examples of VA characters, which is related to all the other litres of electronic ink I've spilled explaining why it's stupid that nobody actually believes in their own paradigms. If paradigms are supposed to be unimportant, maybe don't tell players to pick between paradigm-based factions at character creation?

Count Chocula posted:

You seem really hostile to every basic setting and stylistic assumption of Mage. It's cool, not every game is for every person, but so much of this hate seems directed at things that are either inoffensive or pretty cool. Sure, everything is a bit fuzzy - because you're playing reality-warping Mages who can make up their own spells. So maybe a 'Mob' is 12 people if you're using neurolinguistic programming to effect people who can hear your voice, but it's 70 people if you're releasing a mind-control virus. Just discuss it with the ST and go with what seems coolest. That flexibility is the whole point!

I think I laid out, in elaborate detail, why I think fuzzy descriptions are figuratively literally the devil. Yeah, you can discuss it with your ST, but nowhere does it say that you have to and avoiding the need to discuss those parameters is why the rules exist in the first place. Like, seriously, it was at the front of about every WoD corebook that was released; "Bang bang. You're dead." "No, you missed me." "Did not." "Did too!". M20 can't and doesn't need to parameterize every possibility of what a person can accomplish, but I don't think my call for numbers more specific than "a mob" is somehow unreasonable.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kai Tave posted:

Y'know, I don't give poo poo one about Mage personally but it doesn't seem terribly hard for even me to figure out that if you're going to sell Mage fans a big 20th Anniversary love letter edition of their beloved game that maybe you ought to give them what they want and not "here's the way it should be to me, Phil Satyros Dogfucker Brucato." There's a time and a place to editorialize, and the history of White Wolf's Mage is one of writers being unable to figure that out.

Well, I have occasionally come into conversation with this huge M20 fan on rpg.net who thinks that M20 is a work of unparalleled perfection written for 2e fans like him, so some people seem to really like Brucato as a writer and think that his writing is the epitome of MTAs.

Of course, this same person also dismissed my complaints about editorializing about Abrahamic religions as a) the demented scripture actually was demented, so M20 was just saying it like it was, and b) it was in-character text, so I shouldn't take it seriously or be offended by it because nobody was actually stating that's the way it was.. It was just supposed to set the tone, because the World of Darkness isn't our world, so senseless religious violence is really just par for the course. His only critique of M20 was that the Hollow One was Japanese goth and not European goth, and that was totally wrong. It should be more like the German goth festivals and clubs he frequented.

But I digress to rant about strangers on the Internet. My dislike of M20 actually seems to be fairly atypical. Though of course most people talking about M20 these days are going to be people who've read M20 and come to the conclusion that it was just what they wanted, because everyone else have either stopped being interested or wasn't interested in the first place.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Rand Brittain posted:

Well, I mean, it's not like the guy never did anything good. He was behind Guide to the Technocracy, and I don't think any of the complaints listed about M20 would apply to that.

GttT did have Brucato as a writer, but it also had Brian "Mister Technocracy" Campbell as a writer, and Brian Campbell is the guy responsible for the Technocracy chapter in M20. Which is the one part of written text in M20 that I've actually liked.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nessus posted:

This confuses me because why do you need to be advancing a "true" perspective out of character, even with a metaplot and such things? All the WOD lines seemed to have several groups who were various shades of justifiable, "I can see playing these guys," plus a couple of others who were in fact cartoon monsters.

I suspect the actual answer is "Internet fandom talks a lot," of course.

It's useful for buyers if all books are compatible with each other. If one book presents the Technocracy as orphan-murdering fun-haters, and another presents them as beleaguered cops, people who want to run them as beleaguered cops can't use the supplements that have them as baby-killers, and vice versa. It's also very hard to discuss a large setting if every statement about the setting has to be prefaced with a list of every optional setting detail you are or aren't using. Imagine trying to discuss how the Technocracy might react to X if there are, I don't know, five different ways to portray the Technocracy? Having a single truth to the setting simplifies discussion between different players. Oh, and if someone says "I want to run a Mage game, want to join?" you don't have to ask them about every single setting option they're using to figure out whether you want to play it in or not.

Also nerds are suckers for internal consistency.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kai Tave posted:

I feel like the fact that plenty of people apparently came away from GttT thinking "oh poo poo, these guys are right!" is enough evidence of a failure on the writer's part that I don't actually need to do empirical research of my own to reach that conclusion. Now I guess you can just handwave that away with "well maybe all those people are just huge loving morons," but even if they are it's still the writer's (and editor's I suppose but we're talking about White Wolf here so let's not go too crazy) responsibility to get their intended point across.

When it comes to the whole, "actually just the narrator presenting the in-universe perspective the Technocracy has of itself", GttT has the following passage almost at the start:

Guide to the Technocracy posted:

Despite the outsider's view of the Technocrats as soulless, humorless drones, these dudes are cool. Cool as ice. Cool as freon. Cool as the deadly machines at their fingertips. They have to be cool. The future of
humanity rests in their hands.

You'll see many things in this book that seem wildly inconsistent with what you've been told. You'll read truths that fly in the face of everything the mystics claim. You'll grasp feats of technology that everyone says are impossible. Don't believe what you have heard. The truth is here. You
have it in your hands.

This is very hard to read as in-character fiction, what with the reference to itself as a book and everything. The reading that comes most naturally to me is that this is the omniscient narrator, i.e. White Wolf themselves, telling me that the stuff in GttT is the objective truth about the Technocracy in the setting, even if it's contradicted elsewhere. And when it then also goes on about how maybe the Technocracy aren't the fun-police, the natural conclusion is that the Technocracy aren't all that bad.

I mean, here's the Mood of GttT:

Guide to the Technocracy posted:

The Technocratic Union, some say, is a monolith, a towering slab of implacable menace throwing its shadow across the world. Others claim that it's a pillar of stability holding the weight of the world, keeping the sky from falling with its raw strength and intricate craftsmanship.

But the monolith is cracked, honeycombed with microscopic fractures that weaken its apparent stability. If hit too hard, it may shatter, showering the world with jagged pieces. Until then, water, worms and weather continue to spread the fissures.

This book is about life in the cracks and repairing the monolith from within. And it must be repaired, for, if the rock shatters, everything on Earth will suffer. In short, the Technocratic character is a hero, straining to hold a crumbling world together through teamwork, technology, skill and sheer will.

Good luck. You'll need it.
(Emphasis mine.)

Here's a passage from How To Use This Book, speaking directly to the reader about running Mage campaigns with Technocratic characters:

Guide to the Technocracy posted:

And if you're especially resourceful, you'll discover the flaws within the Union, the infestations and infiltrations your hidden masters don't understand or won't reveal. Fortunately, you're not short-sighted enough to try to destroy the Technocracy. Instead, you're going to fix it. You're a Technocrat who has the idealism and ingenuity to solve the problems your Supervisors can't. Heroes don't try to escape from reality.

They take the initiative to save it.

If this book is not supposed to put forward the idea that the Technocracy "are the real heroes who protect us from the evil, light-bulb-fearing Traditions" as a true perspective out-of-character, it should maybe not have, out of character, claimed it was true.

LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Mar 31, 2016

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

I'm not sure I'd call Bellum Mage TERFy; it's not feminist and it's not radical feminist. It's not even excluding transwomen from feminism, because it's not feminist in the first place. It even says that transwomen are women and part of the anti-patriarchy fight!! It just happens to be offensively misguided about what it means to be a transwoman.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

One idea I had for a feminist one-shot was a game of nHunter/WoD Mortals I tentatively titled 'Take Back The Night' where the player characters were a small clique of feminists working at a Battered Women's Shelter who patrolled the neighbourhoods at night to protect women against supernatural attack - assault of women by male vampire being not that different from assault of women by male mortal, in terms of sexual violence and power discrepancies. The less common assault by mortals is, the harder it is for vampires to hide their activities in a sea of misogyny, or so the clique thinks. In addition to killing vampires, conflict would arise from putting feminist questions to the edge; is female-on-male vampire assault something the clique should deal with directly, or should they focus their primary efforts on protecting women against male vampires? Can female vampires be considered female empowerment, or are they just perpetuating the patriarchy by legitimizing violence? Should the clique even fight vampires with violence, or does that also further patriarchal thought?

The characters would all follow a different tenet of feminist; the Marxist feminist sees vampires as the ultimate expression of the class struggle, the radical feminist identified how they work explicitly in terms of a patriarchy, the liberal feminist seeks to equalize men with women through exalting the individual and legal reform, etc.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Asimo posted:

This is a big thing. I admit I haven't followed WoD stuff for ages but I still don't "get" what the hell Beast is supposed to be. What do you do in it besides be a colossal abusive rear end in a top hat? There's no mythic or cinematic archetype you can point to as a quick mental example, and frankly it just isn't adding anything to the setting. All its problems seem to revolve around desperately trying to justify its existence, and that never makes a good product.

A lot of the fan-favourite "minor" gamelines in the nWoD were well-known for being not-so-veiled metaphors for something. Changeling: the Lost is the most well-known one with its blatant abuse metaphors, but there's also Promethean with a metaphor about being some kind of outsider. The major gamelines are often also described as a metaphor for something (though in the major gamelines, it's more like a structure, theme, or simply a lens to view the game through); Vampire is about playing feudal mafia sex criminals, Werewolf is either about playing a gang with a turf to protect or beat cops depending on who you ask, etc.

Anyway, the point is, nChangeling and Promethean's success comes in part from the monster-type being somewhat incidental to the story being told; abuse and alienation respectively. So Beast seems to be an attempt to work further on that - the monster-type isn't important as long as your game is about something compelling, so they just went with generic monsters. And a metaphor about playing a minority who chooses to reject respectability politics in favour of bring prideful of their differences, or something like that.

The net effect is a game with an uninteresting monster archetype coupled to a hilariously misguided and offensive tone.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Night10194 posted:

I've noticed an awful lot of RPGs have the problem of 'Why would 4-5 of these nutjobs be hanging out together'.

Many RPGs labour under the dilemma that they want to let the players play anything, but not everything plays well together. I think the best solution is to simply have a narrower focus and not let players play everything, or build the entire setting around the existence of groups of disparate player characters. The always excellent Delta Green did both, because it tried to solve the problem of why the bellhop, a university professor, and a private eye always end up working together: first, you really should be playing US FedGov employees, and second, you're all part of the same inter-agency group of FedGov agents organized into inter-agency task forces by the FBI Director.

Of course, sometimes the excuse falls flat; Word of Darkness: Gypsies claims that young adult vampire-gypsies, werewolf-gypsies, fae-gypsies, mage-gypsies, and vampire-hunter-gypsies totally join up to go on road trips across the world to get life-experience and mingle with the other types of gypsies. Another example is Eclipse Phase, which claims that people from all the different factions are recruited to work in Space-Delta Green, but never really explains why a decentralized, anarchist-leaning group founded by anarchists would recruit people who hold strong anti-anarchist political beliefs. Or simply most old WoD games really, where inter-faction hostilities are played up as being very, very important, but Cross-Clan/Cross-Tribe/whatever groups are still the default mode of play.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Covok posted:

Or that his love of obfuscation has gone to new insane heights in 7th Sea 2nd edition with a new dice system which, according to numerous individuals I know who understand math very, very well, is impossible to optimize. For those who don't know, you roll a number of d10s then try to make groups of 10s with your result (or 15 for double successes if your skill is high enough). Apparently, you can neither easily predict your odds of success nor can you really ever reliably optimize or ever know if your actually increasing your odds of success with a decision.

Well, it's solvable but Lethe, that's one of the most fiendish systems I think I've ever heard of. Finding the the chance of success for a given number requires, for XdY, covering nearly Y^X cases through dynamic programming. If I ever were to be forced to play 7th Sea 2e, I'd probably want to write my own dice-roller (which is a lot, lot easier than determining the chance of success). Then it might be useful to run the dice-roller a million times or so to find the distribution experimentally.

In case anyone want to throw themselves into the fray, any given dice roll vector (a vector containing the rolled values) can be optimized the following way:

quote:

The function F does the following: For n dice, you first generate the 2^n binary numbers as vectors. Then, for each binary vector{

Multiply the dice roll vector by the binary vector. This "turns off" some of the dice. If the result is 10 or greater, or 15-if-you-have-high-skill continue, otherwise skip to the next binary vector.

Then run F on a dice roll vector containing the numbers you "turned off". Add 1 to the result (or two if you could make a group of 15 and have high skill).

Is this a better result than the last kept option? Then discard the last option and keep this one. (Always keep the first option.)

}

Now you have the best possible result. Return it.

E: as a friend of mine points out though, the expected value of 1 dice is roughly 0.55, except at 1 dice, where it's 0.1.

LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Apr 13, 2016

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

I got bored. Here's a 7th Sea 2e dice statistics calculator:

code:
from random import randint

from pythonds.basic.stack import Stack

def divideBy2(decNumber):
    remstack = Stack()

    while decNumber > 0:
        rem = decNumber % 2
        remstack.push(rem)
        decNumber = decNumber // 2

    binString = ""
    while not remstack.isEmpty():
        binString = binString + str(remstack.pop())

    return binString

def sevensea2roller(rolls):
    dn = len(rolls)
    binary = [0]*dn
    result = 0
    unusedd = rolls[:]
    actived = [0]*dn
    maxv = 0
    curv = 0
    for i in range(2**dn):
        a = str(divideBy2(i))
        unusedd = rolls[:]
        actived = [0]*dn
        for j in range(1,len(a)+1):
            binary[-j] = int(a[-j])
        actived = [a*b for a,b in zip(rolls,binary)]
        if sum(actived) >= 10:
            unusedd = [a-b for a,b in zip(unusedd,actived)]
            while 0 in unusedd:
                unusedd.remove(0)
            if len(unusedd)>0:
                curv = 1 + sevensea2roller(unusedd)
            else:
                curv = 1
        maxv = max(maxv,curv)
    return maxv
                

#print(sevensea2roller([10,10,3,4,5]))

rolls = 10000 #this is the number of times the dice are rolled to calculate the distribution
dice = 5 #this is the number of dice rolled.
results = [0]*(dice+1)
atleast = [0]*(dice+1)
nums = [0]*(dice+1)

for i in range(rolls):
    rolledd = [0]*dice
    for j in range(dice):
        rolledd[j] = randint(1,10)
    a = sevensea2roller(rolledd)
    results[a] = results[a]+1

for i in range(len(results)):
    results[i] = results[i]/rolls
    nums[i] = i

atleast[-1] = results[-1]

for i in range(2,len(atleast)+1):
    atleast[-i] = results[-i]+atleast[1-i]
    
print('Chance of getting exactly/Chance of getting at least:')
print(nums)
print(results)
print(atleast)
print('Expected value:')
print(sum([a*b for a,b in zip(nums,results)]))
The function sevensea2roller(rolls) calculates the optimal grouping of a list of rolled dice. The program itself currently runs sevensea2roller(rolls) for 10,000 randomly generated rolls of five dice and tallies how often a given number comes up. Then it divides the tallies by 10,000 to get the probability of those numbers appearing.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Keiya posted:

And here's a version that doesn't use anything outside the standard library. (Seriously the stack module you used is just a very very thin wrapper over lists...)

Ooooh, cool! The stack module was something I just copied because I didn't know how to make it myself, so one that doesn't use non-standard libraries is great. Thanks!

(In my defence I had been doing geometry for like six hours straight and wrote that program as a break from taxing mental tasks.)

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

PurpleXVI posted:

But wait, what's the OPPOSITE of a roll? Is the opposite of a 10 a 1? The opposite of a 9 a 2? Or is it a -9? Dice rolls don't have opposites.

Actually, they do! The number on the opposite face of the dice is naturally the opposite of the rolled number. Now, I have here a d10, and all the opposite sides have a sum of 9, with 9 and 0 being opposites. Though you're right in that this needs to actually be explained, because not everyone are as geeky about convex isohedra as I am.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kemper Boyd posted:

Beast is probably the first WoD game where I really can't see how you'd even play it.

My impression of a lot of World of Darkness games, especially the ones that get released late in a line, is that they're all character concept and very few immediate hooks for what you should do as that character, other than exist. Most of the major gamelines i the nWoD were organized around the existence of several types of antagonist that you could face off against (other types of supernatural creature, organized enemies of your own supernatural type, and individual enemies of your own supernatural type), while the oWoD's major gamelines were big on major antagonists (the Sabbat, the Wyrm, the Technocracy). Beast is a shittier form of Vampire where all you can do is fight hunters, and the game is incredibly smug about your moral right to kill the hunters. Besides, beating up comatose girls isn't all that interesting.

Mummy: the Ressurection had a similar problem, and skimming Demon: the Fallen has left me with a similar feeling that someone was pushing a concept without really making a good game out of it.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Going to quote myself from the WoD thread:

quote:

Hunter Alice: "I'm here to kill you, Beast."
Beast Bob: "What gives you the right?"
Alice: "The right to what?"
Bob: "What gives you the right to kill me?"
Alice: "You killed three people!"
Bob: "But you're going to kill me now."
Alice: "You killed three people for not tipping. You tortured five others because you felt like it. You've kidnapped children and abandoned them in the woods."
Bob: "But does that give you the right to kill me?"
Alice: "Yes!"
Bob: "And where does that right come from?"
Alice: "Well, strictly speaking, rights are deontological, and the reason I'm killing you is to reduce your capacity for harm, which is more of a utilitarian argument. I guess you could say that my right to kill you comes from the premise that actions that increase the amount of goodness in the world are inherently moral, and therefore allowable and 'right' in a society."
Bob: "Uh... but... uh... um..."
Abigail, Alice's player: "See, I told you Academics 4 (Moral Philosophy) would come in handy when fighting monsters."

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Maxwell Lord posted:

(On top of this, this is literally a punisher of mansplainers. What's next, a Beast that preys on guys who spread their legs on the bus?)

It appears to have been cut from the final edition, but the original draft did have the Beast that preyed on people who didn't tip.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kai Tave posted:

And that really is the fundamental problem with Beast, even if you strip away the absolutely gross strawman/noble abusers/Beasts as persecuted minorities who get to abuse strawmen/etc. garbage, even if you jettison all of that into the sun, what you're left with is the question "What does Beast do, what themes does it bring to the table or avenue to explore humanity does it wander down, that you can't get anywhere else from another World of Darkness game?" And the answer is there isn't any. I think it's pretty telling that there have been dozens upon dozens of attempts at "I can see Beast being good if [THING]" both here and in the WoD/White Wolf thread and the problem they all run into is that no matter how people try to finesse it, the best that you can really do with Beast is turn it into something that resembles some other WoD line instead of its own thing. You can't even go for shallow "rule of cool" factor because nothing about Beast is cool, you aren't playing a literal medusa or Godzilla in the modern day, you're just some guy with a ~monstrous soul~, who gives a poo poo about that when you can be an actual for-real vampire or werewolf or biomechanical fallen angel? It really is a pointless game.

A friend of mine (speaking on the topic of a theme the Leviathan fansplat had chosen not to explore) suggested a novel niche that I think Beast could fill, and could be interesting to explore as a metaphor; as a Beast, you play someone who strongly believes that because of their birth they are special and are owed reverence, worship, respect, or an elevated status, and comes face-to-face with a world that does not give a rats rear end that you're the reincarnation of Medusa. To them, you're an ordinary human and they're not going to give you special treatment just because you think you're special and better than them. It would be a game about coming to terms with the fact that you're not any better than other people, and your brand of specialness doesn't actually matter to them.

It'd be an artsy game about exploring a concept, and it would not be one that lends itself to the kind of wish-fulfilment power-fantasy Beast wants to be, and it probably wouldn't end up a very popular game.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Doresh posted:

Or you make it like in Parasyte where the alien entity that was supposed to take over your body failed in doing so and is now forced to join you in some jolly co-operation.

But since this is the WoD, the co-operation will probably not be all that jolly.

This sounds like an excellent opportunity to make the game hard to play by invoking my favourite World of Darkness system; Shadowguides! :v:

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Halloween Jack posted:

World of Darkness homebrew is principally an opportunity to examine cases of cargo-cult game design outside the D&D mold.

"Wouldn't it be cool to put Scanners in the WoD? Step one: make a bunch of splats that didn't exist in the movie..."

My principal example within this is nWoD fan's obsession with X-splats and Y-splats. Every idea I've seen for a homebrew nWoD line starts off with "Creature: the Title. You play a Creature. There are five X-splats and five Y-splats." of some kind, completely oblivious to what purpose X-splats and Y-splats should serve, or why there should be five of them. And there's always 5x5, despite the fact that Changeling had 6x4. (And oVampire primarily ran on only 7 X-splats, while oWerewolf had a 13x5x3 model.)

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nah, see, the thing is you have to grog the paradigm of someone who're big on the social justice stuff (which is pretty cool, I'm big on it myself) but blind to unfortunate implications. So Heroes will be former slave-owners and Confederates, and Beasts will be escaped slaves. Only the Heroes are now claiming that the Beasts had to be kept in check because they are dangerous, while Beasts are wallowing in the oppression they're experiencing as freed slaves. The unfortunate implication? Well Beasts actually are dangerous, thereby "justifying" slavery...

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Hostile V posted:

CHAPTER THREE: The Basic Mechanic.

Everything in Brave New World revolves around Target Numbers and hitting that number to do something. The number in your Traits refers to a dice pool of d6s and how many you have to roll. When you roll them, you can take the highest of all results and use it as your result to augment with modifiers. Plus, sixes explode and if it's another six it explodes but they don't add.



Amazing: adjective 1. causing great surprise or sudden wonder.
Incredible: adjective 1. so extraordinary as to seem impossible: incredible speed 2. not credible; hard to believe; unbelievable.
Phenomenal: adjective 1. highly extraordinary or prodigious; exceptional: phenomenal speed

It would seem that the phenomenal is easier than the incredible. And how do I tell when something is Phenomenal as opposed to Amazing?

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

FMguru posted:

Have I missed any?

Skill bloat.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

FMguru posted:

I dunno about skill bloat being a 90s RPG thing. Lots of RPGs from the 80s had too-long skill lists - I'm thinking of GURPS, Rolemaster, and BRP. Call of Cthulhu's reputation as a light game system that gets out of the way is belied by its giant character sheet full of nonsense like Operate Heavy Machinery and having Diagnose Disease and Treat Disease and Treat Poison as separate skills. And the 90s-est RPG of them all, Vampire:the Masquerade and its oWoD offspring, smartly had very limited skill lists. Plus, the most important RPG of the 2000s (D&D 3e) was pretty skill-bloaty itself (Rope Use, anyone?).

While skill bloat is not unique to 90's RPG design, it's a fairly noticeable feature. As others have mentioned, VTM and the other WoD games kept adding skills until the skill system was horrifically bloated with overlapping skills. I'd also point out that while GURPS 3e had serious problems with skill bloat, it also came out in 1988 and was first deprecated in 2004: the majority of its lifecycle was spent in the 90's, constantly updating its list of skills until doing anything with a character made in 1988 became impossible.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kurieg posted:

Beast Culture
Hoooooooo boy, this part is entirely new added even since the copy of the book released in December. See, the Begotten don't really have a world spanning society, but they do have certain societal mores that they try to impose on the others that they initiate into their society.

We Are All Family
Beasts are all related to the Dark Mother, even if only symbolically. So they consider it a responsibility to take care of one another. Sometimes that means tough love, as a Beast who won't curb their impulses attracts attention from Heroes or their extended family, and that endngers all of the Beasts. For the most part, though, Beasts are expected to try and figure out why one of their siblings is out of control before taking violent or punitive action.

We Are Allowed To Be What We Are
Beasts are monsters, they can't not be. They must be allowed to hunt, feed, and even kill. Beasts debate over how monstrous they're allowed to be before intevention is appropriate, and some of that debate involves the specifics of the region, what kind of extended family is around and what their priorities are, what Hero activity has been like, and who the Apex is.

Eat to Live, Don't Live to Eat
Beasts must be more than just their Horrors. A Horror only wants to sate it's Hunger, but a Beast isn't just that Hunger. A Beast can use her hunger to teach the world, to bring it wisdom (not knowlege). Beasts expect their siblings to do so, to bring some kind of lesson with them when they choose their victims. Feeding for survival, of course, is different. If the options are "Feed without teaching" or "Starve" no one would begrudge a little mayhem. At the same time, Beasts encourage eachother to consider how their feeding affects the world, after all they have to be better than the Heroes make them out to be.


These are literally Geek Social Fallacies, we can't ostracise anyone because we're family, we can only do so if they're making the rest of us look bad. The idea that "outsiders" need to band together against the oppression of the popular kids and that we can't make any judgements about them because obviously we're just as bad and... yeah. Beast culture exists to reinforce itself and nothing else.

I see what McFarland is trying to do here. He's trying to draw a parallel to the gay community and on a larger scale the non-hetronormative LGBT community, the concept of an LGBT Family, and Gay house culture. Their shared hardship makes all Beasts into a family that organizes itself into independent, unorganized households of mostly young people, and they rail against respectability politics; gay people should not have to follow the arbitrary norms of the heteronormative society. Expressions of homosexuality, of flamboyance, genders that fall outside the norm - all of these things should be acceptable.

And it's easy to say that now; we're all one big family and gay people (here represented by Beasts) should be allowed to be what they are. Unfortunately (and this is touching on the knife's edge of bad taste here) this also invites a comparison to people who have been part of the greater gay movement but who have been excluded because, in fact, not everyone are allowed to be who they are. The North American Man/Boy Love Association are not accepted by the LGBT community to be who they are, and when NAMBLA were associated with the LGBT movement, it was rather controversial. In 1994, the US Congress suspended 119 million US dollars in UN support to the International Gay and Lesbian Association by a unanimous vote because the IGLA comprised NAMBLA. Earlier, from 1979 to the mid-80's, various LGBT groups had decided not to join in Pride marches because NAMBLA was dominating or allowed to participate. The prominent gay rights advocate Harry Hay is someone I suspect most people don't mention much these days because his work in the 80's and 90's was to protest that NAMBLA was excluded from the mainstream LGBT organizations and his advocacy for older gay men to have sexual relationships with 13-year-old boys. Part of the reason the homosexual/pedophile argument stands so strong and prominent even today is because NAMBLA was part of the LGBT movement.

The whole "we're allowed to be what we are" thing that LGBT people are supposed to be prideful of is one that comes with the caveat "unless you're actually really loving nasty". (The gay-dominated LGBT community has also taken criticism from some feminists and some transwomen for how it exalts drag shows, by the critics are seen as extremely misogynistic. The reason this is not spoken very loudly of is because of solidarity; anti-drag feminists were silenced or excluded in order to strengthen ties between the LGBT and Feminist movements in the 70's and 80's.) You're not supposed to be ashamed of who you are if you're part of the LGBT family, but you're not allowed to be part of it if you're a child molester.

And why aren't child molesters allowed be part of the LGBT movement these days?

Because they hurt people. Like Beasts do.

Beasts are not GLAAD. They're NAMBLA.

LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 20:50 on May 22, 2016

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Kavak posted:

The original saying is "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." Couldn't even get that right.

The writer could be going for the earlier quotation is "Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!"

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LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nancy_Noxious posted:

That one is easy. The Technocracy are STEMlords, so it's not like they're evil queer monsters or anything, so STEMlord nerds dig them. Take for instance that really unfair Mage20 review that was going on, it was a celebration of sciency nerd types. Fashionable tattooed characters were despicable, fugly characters wearing Darwin t-shirts and sweatpants were awesome!

I find it vaguely amusing that you call me out for being a biased STEMlady with anti-queer sentiments by pointing out the characters I like are ugly. :nallears:

And yeah, I like sciency nerd types. It comes with being a sciency nerd. I don't seem particularly drawn to the Traditions or Crafts, despite being a lesbian transwoman feminist.

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