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^^^^ Beyond the Wall has that, too, but it's already an OD&D mod anyway. It's got tables that tie cool poo poo to each of your stats as you build them. Just quoting this post for convenience. It looks like you missed my tiny Alien Summit review, and also my username changed. (I was Plague of Hats.) I still plan to get back to my MERP review, but I don't begrudge it being marked abandoned. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 06:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'd like to point out that DrivethruRPG does in fact sell Gamma World 7th Edition on PDF. Awesome. Thanks for posting that; I never would've thought to search for these. I'm sincerely surprised they went to the trouble of doing up the cards for PoD.
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Jan 7, 2016 21:19
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I really liked the idea behind the Catches, and the Contracts in general, but Lost is yet another WW game that showcases why "everything must come in lists of five discrete powers" is pretty dumb. There's something to be said of "siloing" information to make character creation and advancement easier, but you're already stuffing a book with 20, 30, 40 pages of just lists of highly idiosyncratic magic tricks, so that advantage starts to erode pretty quickly.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:20
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theironjef posted:This is super rad but the rarity would be way off unless they print five commons for every rare. Then again, it's not like you need to cube draft the drat things, and it was stupid that they used rarity in the first place. In fact, I am strongly considering getting them printed. So, there are 120 unique cards just in the expansion? I'd just as soon have a complete set and everyone be guaranteed unique powers, rather than cobbling together however many hundreds of cards I bought into a deck that's maddeningly only 90% complete. Also, while the cards are a fine tactile game aid, you could just turn out a rolled table if you couldn't or didn't want to use cards, right? The key thing is having wacky random Frankenstein's characters after all.
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Jan 8, 2016 04:36
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Count Chocula posted:And I maintain that that is a valid premise for a game. The players know that's how magic works so they can pick and choose what their character does. My Cathartic/voudoun Mage cast magic with his cross and his guitar, and the tension between the different parts of his paradigm was a big part of his character. ANYTHING can be magic if you believe in it enough, and 'art is magic' is a pretty obvious statement to a ton of people. I think the big problem is that the books act like these characters are all supposed to have coherent, solid magical traditions, which is after all what makes the warring factions make any goddamn sense. But then a lot of the time no one seems to care, including some of the authors, because ~the truth~ means none of that actually matters. And then, uh, why did I spend $50+ on these books all about these dumb delusional factions that are dumb and delusional?
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Jan 10, 2016 04:40
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^^^^  gradenko_2000 posted:I thought this was the thread best equipped to answer my question: what does "akashic" mean in the context of fantasy fiction? I've seen it come up in some RPGs but I don't really know what that is. It's usually pretty close to the basic philosophical/pseudoscientific meaning: Some abstract/spiritual grand record of knowledge accessed through enlightenment. Per Wiki: quote:There are anecdotal accounts but no scientific evidence for existence of the Akashic records.  It's a fairly recent invention. Edgar Cayce comes up, so, you know.
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Jan 10, 2016 17:19
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LornMarkus posted:Mostly I just find it weird that more than once I've heard it come up specifically in reference to dudes that primarily just punch people. Great spiritual enlightenment and ultimate kung fu are often associated in fiction.
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Jan 10, 2016 17:22
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That "outer gods/nihilists but who really cares" split is how everyone I knew ended up using the Nephandi, even if they stuck pretty close to the rest of the setting. For them to be organized into these distinct and weird factions when they're supposed to be so loving rare, even by WoD's inconsistent standards, was too much.Hunt11 posted:Do you know what I find really funny about the idea of the Nephandi being behind WWII and 9/11 is that if handled properly, which I assume it isn't, could actually be a col plot point. So going with the whole nihilism idea make it that they view living as suffering and so have dedicated themselves to putting humanity out of it's misery. So to do that they first need a tool capable of wiping out Humanity, and that is the atomic bomb. So they help start WWII but at most all they are doing is giving natural events a light push, and instead all their effort goes to developing nuclear weaponry and making sure that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have them. So now the Cold War becomes a constant game of theirs to finally push in just the right place for the dominoes to fall and nuclear war to occur. Obviously that plan keeps on failing so eventually they push to break up the U.S.S.R. to create a power vacuum that would eventually lead to a new global crisis to take advantage off. If I recall correctly, cWoD was adamantly "Hitler was just human omg man's inhumanity to man!" Nephandi and Wyrm werewolves and racist regular werewolves and ultimate mind control Technocrats and whatever were just hangers on all the way to the end…somehow. Which might sound reasonable in light of recent tangents, but considering he's basically the only one who gets that sort of treatment it comes off as cheap edgelord posturing. Like many of oWoD's problems, it could've been solved by just having some goddamn restraint.
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Jan 11, 2016 14:27
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Doresh posted:Wasn't Hitler like the only thing without any supernatural involvement? Pretty much. One of the best ?jokes? they ever pulled was having like five different supernatural conspiracies claiming Rasputin as their own. That kind of sarcastic self awareness was refreshing sometimes. Likewise Nazi-hunting Aryan werewolves. quote:Either way, pretty silly to make everything a giant nihilist conspiracy. Humans have always been dicks to each other. They need no weird mages to help them out. oWoD always had trouble with just what kind of monster everyone is supposed to be. And, I mean, that's fair enough; it's decades old and was written by a grojillion different people with varying levels of editorial oversight. It just seems like these nostalgia editions also can't pick between "fix what was busted" and "but it's part of the legacy maaaan." quote:This is what the WoD should be all about. Also yes this.
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Jan 11, 2016 21:51
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LatwPIAT posted:Research: First, I wish to state that I have, for all practical purposes, have not watched a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then I want you to keep in mind that the dot ratings are supposed to provide context for what each rating means. Then I want you to look at the following description for this skill from the book: Haha holy poo poo. That skill bloat though, wow. It's even worse when you compile it into a single book. M20 seems markedly different from the other anniversary editions in this way. Sure, V20 and W20 still have cruft all over, but I know at least some of the work behind them was "hey, let's make this creaky old game more playable." It feels like M20 didn't even think of trying any of that.
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Jan 14, 2016 13:03
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When V20 was gearing up, there was a serious discussion of the merits of the earlier edition, incredibly lovely dice pools because, after all, it's a prestige nostalgia book and not a "new" edition. But they heavily changed the physical Disciplines because But they didn't change the first five levels of Chimerstry because Also, I believe (heard, never read) later when W20 came out it was found that the Gifts were written under the assumption that dice pools would work like V20, but the core system had actually been done up differently, so some Gifts don't make sense. Because at WW and now OPP it is entirely up to each line dev, and even sometimes individual authors on a given book, to communicate and maintain consistency. Which it can be granted they're doing a hell of a lot better than they used to…back when a lot of authors and devs physically worked in the same office. :sadtrombone:
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Jan 15, 2016 01:43
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Part of the problem is that a lot of what we love about the modern world is implicitly or even explicitly "tagged" as Technocratic, and the counter from the Traditions to questions like "what about vaccine programs?" is often nothing at all. You barely scratch the surface, and a lot of what the Traditions say is "we want back the days of wizard kings ruling unwashed peasants…but we swear we won't be so callous this time." The most sympathetic aspect of the Traditions is fighting cultural hegemony, but when it's weighed down by linkage to the drastically conservative overarching philosophy it becomes harder to empathize. That's why the game tends to get worse when you get too far away from urban shamans throwing exploding poker cards at the Terminator and MiBs. It just isn't very good at the other stuff people seem to want it to do.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:17
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Rand Brittain posted:They don't actually say that, though? That's something people often attribute to them but it's not really part of the game's description of them. I don't have the books to cite, anymore, but I'm sure at least a few factions explicitly do, but primarily that this is a (probably unintentional) implicit theme throughout the game line. I love the game and what it can be used for, but when it comes to unexamined assumptions and accidental themes it's still just another White Wolf game from the 90's.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:36
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Rand Brittain posted:Honestly, I don't think the books ever really talk about what the Traditions want other than "freedom from being cyborg murdered" because that's such a far-off, nebulous future that there's no point. People just read intentions onto them to match their bias. (And okay, there's probably at least one book that states that the Tradtions are totally planning to turn the entire world into Generic Fantasy Europe, because of course there is.) I think it's because there are a lot more solid and detailed "truths" to Mage, and all the base philosophies start out wildly wrong about them. Selachian posted:This, by the way, is where the whole "roleplaying vs. rollplaying" I mean, it got super charged by the WoD counterculture, but "role vs roll" goes back to pretty much the beginning. As soon as they allowed fan letters into the ubiquitous magazines of the time, we were doomed to suffer this argument forever. (Also I seem to recall Gygax himself indulging in it from time to time in his own columns.)
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Jan 18, 2016 02:16
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thing got started. It was originally meant to draw a distinction between the White Wolf games, which were all about character and personality and humanity and Deep Cosmic Questions maaaaan, and D&D and its relatives, where you just rolled dice to kill monsters and take their stuff.
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theironjef posted:
This showed up in my RSS as part 1 of the Immortal review again, which was very surprising! LatwPIAT posted:Oh, 1's subtract successes in M20. And it's no successes and any 1's that causes Botches, which can be result in some pretty weird Botch distributions at high difficulties. I went back to check and this is how they do all the 20th anniversary editions. 
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Jan 19, 2016 08:11
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LatwPIAT posted:mediocrum This is a pretty great typo! Also, it takes like an hour tops to find out the general armament of real modern tanks and similar stuff. This is one of those persistent problems with """rules light""" systems that nevertheless want to plop huge lists of gun porn in front of you. Tons of authors seem to want to do this but without going to the pretty minimal effort of not being totally wrong at it.
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Jan 24, 2016 19:39
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I vote D for Danestorm, because I liked the premise but it's one of those few game supplements where I couldn't get through the book.theironjef posted:Hey guys I also have an opinion about the later seasons of Supernatural! Holy poo poo you guys are stepping up your game. Also I'm still listening to the intro.
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Jan 26, 2016 08:08
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theironjef posted:Last time, on SYSTEM MASTERY: With nothing better to do, two podcasters unhappily trudged through the ruins of the Synnibarr game system. But little did they know that far in the distance an evil and yet more dangerous book was descending upon the Earth. Now, do our brave dudes stand a chance against this new and terrible threat? Find out, on todays One of the great things about the following books in this series is that a good chunk of them were just rules kludges and errata to fix the system so that it would work at the rapidly increasing power levels and also could faithfully include stats for the powers they had not planned for. The game was written either without awareness or without foresight, which I guess is true-to-source.
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Mar 1, 2016 11:24
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At the LGS my friend owned a decade ago, Yugioh players routinely destroyed the bathroom and left incredible messes in the game room. Also, the regular group of YGO players was a bunch of 12-year-olds plus one nervous balding guy in an army jacket. After shutting down their sponsored tournaments for the sake of other patrons and nervousness about that older guy, he immediately regretted it because they spent a stupid amount of money on that lovely game every week.
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Mar 8, 2016 20:02
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theironjef posted:Hey guys, here's the big System Mastery offering for the week. It's The Great War of Magellan, the only RPG written by the guy that played Captain Apollo on Battlestar Galactica as far as I care to know. ?Unfortunately? the Great War of Magellan web site is full of dead links and doesn't really mention the RPG. ?Fortunately? you can still catch the interminably early-2000's 2:46 trailer on their Facebook page!(???) (Edit: You can also watch an 18-minute behind the scenes featurette about GWOM here if you're a loving idiot.) (Edit 2: The only other person who seems to have ever given a poo poo about this is "SciFi Ranter Girl" whose blog has a Second Life slave girl tiled graphic background and said quote:The Great War of Magellan is a project by Richard Hatch and MerlinQuest Entertainment. and then you know exactly more than you needed to. System Mastery is already in the top 20 Google links for this poo poo.) (Edit 3, the last, I swear: Signed copy on eBay.) I haven't actually listened to the episode yet, so as my last thought I'll just mention that Richard Hatch said that the BSG reboot making Starbuck a woman was ridiculous until they gave him a role. I hope this kind of attitude shines through in his ?licensed? ?RPG? ?book?. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Mar 15, 2016 |
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Mar 15, 2016 06:59
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theironjef posted: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. Holy poo poo that intro.
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Mar 23, 2016 01:13
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quote:Sin-Eater: I knock you down. You get up. OK. But if a ghost helps you up, does that still count? Good loving Christ. This is one of the worst stereotype lines I've seen. A lot of these immediately bring to mind the latest F Plus where they read a bunch of "and then everyone applauded me as the bully ran away" stories.
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Apr 24, 2016 02:32
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:People in any industry can be motivated by greed, they can also just be really bad at picking avenues to reliably satisfy their motivations. In the case of Exalted, it's definitely not greed. Whatever other problems it has, the avalanche of content is born out of love of the game. "For the love" is also a big problem in this industry! 
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Apr 26, 2016 01:15
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I think a key misstep for Beast was that it didn't really have many layers. At the very least it could have obfuscated itself better, but it really seemed to just be "you're an awesome elf dragon
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Apr 30, 2016 01:25
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Beasts were responsible for undermining Reconstruction, to teach us the lesson that freedom and harmony are hard, but they were too good at their jobs. Now everyone blames the Beasts unfairly. If only the good people had been good-er! :sadtrombone:
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May 2, 2016 01:19
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Traveller posted:There is simply no way in which this won't be a horrible clusterfuck. gently caress this hobby and gently caress OPP. Depends on who the author is.
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May 2, 2016 03:27
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The This is part of why Beast was such a shock.
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May 4, 2016 05:16
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Though, to rain on my own good vibes, I'm largely disappointed with nWoD 2.0, rules-wise. It feels like they made a lot of pretty good foundational changes that better fit the moniker of "storytelling" games, but then they take those lighter core ideas and hang too much fiddly poo poo on them. (e.g., gently caress what they did with Tilts)
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May 4, 2016 07:49
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unseenlibrarian posted:Vampire -started- with a limited skill list, but they kept adding new ones with vague suggestions that these other skills were secondary and should maybe cost less because they were narrower in scope? But AFAIK there weren't any fast rules on that. By the second editions at least, there were hard rules for secondary Abilities costing less. Also, of course, complexities where, oh, no, this one isn't discounted because But, yeah, every oWoD game started with a light-ish skill list, and then shortly received dozens of fiddly new skills in a player's guide, plus more handfuls tacked on in this or that supplement. But the original lists weren't quite as light as they should've been, either. You've got Etiquette, Lore (specific social group), Empathy, Subterfuge, Performance all covering lots of the same stuff. Or not, depending on your GM. And then there're the redundancies beyond the skills. Every game has Alertness, which was normal situational awareness, then most also had Awareness, which was incredibly ill-defined spooky-sight. And then you had various super powers that also gave you spooky-sight, but of course with more solid rules that stomped all over the (presumed?) utility of Awareness.
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May 12, 2016 11:53
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I at least skim nearly every review unless it's about a book that I absolutely cannot care about on any level, which are few and far between (but includes nearly every superhero anything—sorry Hostile V). I really appreciate the work that goes into the reviews. Like every other human being on Earth I don't just say that kind of thing enough about the things that I enjoy. I'm enjoying the Banestorm and Beast reviews, and I'm pretty fascinated by the Planescape stuff since I never really got into that setting even though I love Dark Sun. I enjoyed the podcast about Beast, though the sound was kind of crap even after some alleged fix. I'm pretty dubious about thinking any of this is all that important, though. Or that 30k critical words about 300k bad words is a better "KEEP AWAY" signpost than just briefly telling someone about Coma Dream Hunter Who Deserved What She Got. It's fun to take apart and examine things, good and bad, but anyone coming to this rodeo is probably already firmly in one or the other mindset of "Eh, whatever" or "Games and gamers can be better" before reading a single word on Something Awful the Garbage Comedy Web Site. Keep up the good work!
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Jun 4, 2016 09:13
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Werewolf the Apocalypse was also originally published when Captain Planet was acceptable mainstream "awareness", and magical injuns and wise black servants were still "inclusive" things to do. On the one hand, we shouldn't act like we're super enlightened elites today, but on the other hand two decades really can make an incredible difference. As a relatively big part of RPG nostalgia, WtA is going to keep getting published, and as a nostalgia product it's never going to fully escape its now-embarrassing roots. Beast is a brand new IP, so it doesn't even have that weak excuse. It's just plain bad.
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Jun 6, 2016 04:27
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theironjef posted: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. Before I really knew what was up with how Simbieda seems to think games are run, I always assumed it was a bunch of weirdos (Rogue Scholar, Mind Melter, whatever) versus dragons and robo-Nazis. Like most games of its time, it just gave you a bunch of rules for all that poo poo, even though you shouldn't need so much drill-down into the faceless mooks you fight. I still kind of suspect this is where it at least started, but like everything else Palladium it just drove a flaming bus into crazy-town. My first real exposure to Rifts was a giant game of like a dozen people as vampire hunters in Mexico. It was loving awesome, but I quickly lost interest because even as a teenager I had little patience for the foibles of gaming groups that exceeded six or so people. I tried getting into another game, but it was corebook-only and the GM had nothing to back up the promise of the game. We spent two whole sessions as a bunch of poo poo-tier adventurers cowering in a town being inspected by Coalition badasses, then someone made a mistake and all our SDC asses died near instantaneous MDC deaths. Ever since I've never gotten much into Rifts, even though I read quite a few worldbooks because of the cover or basic pitch. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Jun 17, 2016 |
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Jun 17, 2016 10:07
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theironjef posted:System Mastery Time! Um, excuse me, Elder Scrolls dwarves are dwemer, not dunmer. Gawsh! Also, interesting episode about a game that seems a lot more fun with just a little house ruling.
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Jun 21, 2016 18:22
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theironjef posted:(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) Ha! I picked up on that, too.
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Jun 22, 2016 01:25
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The Demon F&F got me kicking around ideas, and it looks like I might be running a game of it soon, so I'm re-reading it myself. Holy poo poo, I forgot all about these loving sidebars full of white text on top of backgrounds full of white patches gently caress YOUUUUU Maybe this was remarked on earlier; I haven't been following the conversation closely. But, just, goddamn.
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Jun 25, 2016 10:36
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Count Chocula posted:Has there ever been a game about either playing as or hunting cryptids? That would be fun, like that kids show, Secret Seven, about hunting cryptids. You could have a Bigfoot/skunk ape/yeti splat, a reptilian one, chupacabras, mothmen... This is what a lot of people thought/hoped Beast was going to be.
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Jun 27, 2016 00:09
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm not an exhaustive reader of Herbert's commentaries and interviews, criticism of his work, etc. But I have read that, among other things, he personally believed the statements from Children of Dune that say aristocracy is the natural, inevitable state of humankind. So it wouldn't surprise me if he took it for granted that patriarchy is also "natural." Don't forget also that part of the Golden Path is to make women the militaristic, "dominant" gender for 3,000 years, to "balance out" humanity and make us True Gender Neutral. The following books then descend into outright sex magic that is female-only until, once again, a male counterpart arrives to save us all.
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Jul 9, 2016 03:34
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Cythereal posted:This talk of gender politics makes me wonder how Dune would treat a gay character. I don't recall the books ever addressing the possibility. I think there's some gay pedophilia from Baron Harkonnen in the first book. There's also a casual lesbian relationship in God Emperor; it freaks out the clone of an ancient guy who died in the first book, and the Emperor is all "lol grow up…it's a natural consequence of gender-segregated military service." Not so great.
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Jul 9, 2016 04:07
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Don't forget it also costs some hundred extra dollars to get early access to the beta rules. I'm pretty whatever about anyone spending ridiculous money on our ridiculous hobby, but charging through the nose for an early draft of your rules is some real bullshit.
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Sep 10, 2016 05:43
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Simian_Prime posted:Weird random question: would L5R be a good system for J-Horror? It has corruption and fear systems, but they're pretty traditional "you failed the roll against  and now you have to run 50 yards."
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Sep 21, 2016 19:59
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