|
Tatum Girlparts posted:Beast is by far one of the biggest RPG disappointments for me. This game could be so cool as a thing where it's this constant push and pull between the 'hero' and the 'beast' where the entire point is 'good' and 'bad' in these stories is a matter of perspective a lot of times and heroes can do horrible things and monsters can be noble and all that. You know, really push the WoD universe that's supposed to already revel in shades of grey. The disappointment is even bone-deeper than that, though. I remember when the game was just starting to get teased, and myself and many others thought "I'm secretly a dragon and my existence causes 'heroes' to fight me and create legends" sounded pretty cool. Then it turns out you just have the "soul" of a dragon, and further that the game is literally a somehow unwitting metaphor for the dregs of Tumblr stereotypes. Like, subverting expectations is probably good for any creative project to do at least a little if you want to be remembered for more than a hot second. But way to "flip the script" to such a degree that the obvious elevator pitch vanishes completely in a puff of pretentious argot.
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2016 06:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:28 |
|
|
theironjef posted:I too was ultimately disappointed by Fireborn. My friend bought the Players Guide or whatever for Fireborn a long time ago, but couldn't get a hold of the GM's book, whatever that was called. The PG really excited him, though, and he was always talking about trying to get a game going. Then he got hold of the GM's book and whatever expanded mechanics it had or didn't have in there for your dragon-soul flashbacks made him go "Oh" and immediately drop the idea. Grnegsnspm posted:Way back in the long, long ago; Jef and I (mostly Jef) kept saying that we would review this Batman RPG he had. We kept putting it off. The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. But now we make good on that promise. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Batman Roleplaying Game I hope the title is direly accurate.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2016 06:21
|
|
|
It depends on which copy of FATAL you're talking about. Some are a slim ~600 pages. The most widely available version is around 900, because that's when it got infamous. I don't remember what extra material makes the difference as opposed to just different layout, but I think the d2000 table of random magical events (in alphabetical order!) was originally in a supplement and that's probably the bulk of the further bloating.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2016 17:40
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:I'm not sure if "homophobic" is quite the right word, because I'm 100% sure Beast was written with good intentions. I mean, maybe years ago it would've been nice to come up with a word or words for better examining things as "accidentally gay-bashing/racist/misogynistic", but I think it's pretty firmly established now that "homophobic" or "racist" are everyone's go-to regardless of context. We liberal commie SJW scum have allowed ourselves to be mired on this particular battlefield where assholes whine "I'm not literally afraid of gays/I don't literally hate women, therefore no u."
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2016 20:10
|
|
|
^^^^  wiegieman posted:Earthdawn barely gets away with having elves and dwarves by making the elves primitive, regressed tree dwellers (who happen to be from the BLOOD FOREST) and the dwarves the Italian renaissance who are the rulers of the world in the place of the humans who are warmongers. I'd also cut it a little slack because it originally came out in '93.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2016 18:17
|
|
|
BinaryDoubts posted:Wait, people you encounter outside of Earth have a significant chance to be non-sentient beings, like the robots in Westworld? Like Occam's said, the conscious thought process probably was along the lines of a sort of morally abusable NPC underclass. It also probably unintentionally stems from good old unexamined exoticism, which is how we got the Elemental Plane of Non-person Native American Stereotypes, and that other place with people literally called "wetbacks."
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2016 10:47
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:if you're talking about the "beaners" in that last bit, those are in Numenera, fyi Whoops. It's hard to keep the bizarrely bad things from these games straight.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2016 18:21
|
|
|
Kellsterik posted:One of my "favorite" things about Mummy is that they opted for a very traditional World of Darkness political setup where there are large, organized political factions that everyone is a member of, and each city has a Nomarch (read: Prince) in charge of everything. Despite the fact that mummies are asleep for decades at a time, and also were all created at the same time and are theoretically of equal power, and also every individual mummy commands a secretive and shadowy cult. It's a little busy. I feel like this is a bit iconic of the entire nMummy experience. The elevator pitch, if you can dig it out of all the jargon and pretension, is really attractive, but then the books (mostly the core) won't just shut the gently caress up. It feels like fanfiction of itself. BinaryDoubts posted:As someone who never had any interaction with the World of Darkness games, I'm really enjoying these running looks into what is probably the single broadest RPG franchise. As with Beast, Mummy doesn't immediately stand out to me as fulfilling a common fantasy - who has ever said "man, gently caress vampires, what I really want is to get some BANDAGES up in this piece," but the idea of warrior-spirits trapped in a cycle of reawakening sounds kinda promising. I know the answer is probably none, but how much mechanical support is there to the idea that you're slowly recovering pieces of your past lives? I can see a neat character creation system where you establish what you remember and what you're good at by describing a specific memory when faced with a challenge during the current story. There're some okay Memory mechanics, but they could've very easily been much, much better. There're actually a pretty decent handful of "things for player groups to coalesce around" for a throwback-y WoD book, though that might mostly be due to the supplements. I don't remember clearly.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2016 07:06
|
|
|
Kellsterik posted:Mummy is actually very good at giving you stuff to do in a session: find magic items that rightfully belong to you and yours and were stolen, fight the bad guys with your cult by your side and get the relic back, return them to your tomb. The rest of the game is variations and expansions on that premise. This speaks to one of the things that jumped out at me as a pretty obvious fix, and perfect for gaming tables. The Arisen have these crazy huge powers that are sort of referred to as ritual magic all the time, but they're mechanically still basically just "spend MP, get immediate effect." There's some weak cost-sharing mechanic, but you're likely pushing hard to be able to use the powers you personally bought for your character anyway so uh. Which is why a book about "mummies are the immortal class of servant guilds of a long-dead magical empire" really really should've focused more on actual teamwork mechanics. Needing an entire player group to summon a meteor or resurrect an ally is sitting right there, just on the game's periphery. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2016 00:07
|
|
|
Extreme Sports Baby is amazing. Thank you.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2016 05:29
|
|
|
quote:The decisions I made were as the Publisher and Chief Game Designer for Palladium Books. I'm sorry the expectations of Josh and Joshua may have been dashed by my decisions, but I had to do what I believed was best for the product, the company and the fans. That's what I did. It is my job and responsibility. I have no regrets. Reminder: In the middle of the slow trainwreck that has been Robotech Tactics fulfillment, KS spat out a 10k+ word "update" (it hit the character limit and had to be broken into two posts) that wanked about Palladium's long gone licenses, threw their partnering company under the bus for nearly everything, and also admitted that no one had figured out where or to whom product needed to be shipped until the factory in China had their first shipment ready and asked what the gently caress was up. quote:Role-playing games are really just an advanced form of regular board games. In fact, they are so advanced they no longer use a board and the playing pieces are the characters in each player's imagination. Pretty cool already, and you haven't even started playing. 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2016 05:11
|
|
|
While it feels a little unfair, I think part of the Rogue/Decker Problem is that 90% of games are enamored with blow-by-blow action. This is already kind of bullshit just in any given scenario, but when you start overlapping tasks that have different kinds of pacing for one reason or another, it inevitably becomes a train wreck.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2016 09:45
|
|
|
quote:The item takes on the context of the new recursion, if applicable, as decided by the GM. For example, if you want to take an AK-47 assault rifle to Ardeyn, the weapon becomes a particularly well-machined crossbow that fires bolts fast enough to be a rapid-fire weapon. On the other hand, if you bring your smartphone to Ardeyn, it becomes a crystal sphere without much use, since most of the benefits of a smartphone rely on its connection to an Earth-based network. This is truly loving amazing.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 11:28
|
|
|
Nothing will beat combining the models that get you roll bonuses by drinking from a goblet and pretending to ride a horse while you speak with a silly accent. Games Workshop!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 19:37
|
|
|
I certainly won't deny that Dune can be pretty obtuse, and that shields rely a little too much on an almost total lack of terrorists existing (though that's a little bit the point), but I don't think it's a really standout example of dumb world-building. It's especially eyebrow-raising to act like Metal Gear has a leg up on it because of the in-universe bullshit that justifies a cyberninja, but if you take a step back it's still all hanging on the most ridiculous premise about nuke-spitting mecha anyway that's only compelling (?) because Kojima is a master of Infowars: the Soap Opera.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2016 01:41
|
|
|
Hostile V posted:loving hell wow that first bit of fluff really sums up everything wrong with how Heroes are handled. There's some pretty decent Hunter-style characterization but then there's a giant wet fart followed by beating someone to death with a loving geode along with "well guess I'll just be stupid forever now". gently caress me. It's also poorly written, on top of everything else! This fiction doesn't make heroes seem like antagonists that are worth my time at all, in any genre, let alone gothpunk personal horror. "Blargh, I'm crazy and murderous, THE END!!!" What a great story hook full of personal horror for my horrific storytelling story game of horror stories.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2017 05:27
|
|
|
Most of Beast "just" feels woefully misguided. Yet there are certain parts that are just loving gross; it's baffling that anyone thought they were a good idea or that they are in any way defensible or gameable. That comatose dream warrior from the core book was my go-to example. Candy is like a million times worse. What the everliving gently caress. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jan 22, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2017 04:38
|
|
|
RPGnet also seems to have a forum culture that simply shies away from difficult conversations. It's easy to call RaHoWa or WoD: Gypsies garbage, but a misguided attempt to poo poo on internet Nazis by an active moderator who can't be convinced that it was misguided is ignored like your stereotypical Thanksgiving racist uncle. Which is gross in its own way.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2017 07:48
|
|
|
MJ12 posted:The best thing about how bad Beast is that Demon actually is a better 'playing an oppressed minority' game than Beast, and it does it entirely unintentionally by being spy fiction. I thought this was said by Demon co-developer Rose Bailey to be on purpose? MonsieurChoc posted:Didn't the Exalted author also really hate Qin Shi Huangdi, hence his Wraith: the Oblivion portrayal? The Emperor in Wraith was actually pretty badass as I recall. I thought Ghost Nobunaga invaded Ghost China and summarily bisected the Ghost Emperor before their armies, and then a terrifying dragon comically emerged from the lower half of the Emperor and swallowed Nobunaga in a single gulp. (Maybe I'm remembering this backwards?) I'm not sure Grabowski hated Qin Shi Huangdi any more than your typical historical monster, but rather the apologism of movies like Hero (and a lot of other Chinese media). While a pretty cool movie, it basically pushed the usual "hard men making hard decisions" people always fall back on any time they try to defend truly terrible people. Which, you know, is kind of one of the critiques of humanity that Exalted brought to the table when it was at its best. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Jan 22, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2017 10:53
|
|
|
Vampire 2e and Demon are really cool! There's still a lot of cruft, though. But, eh, RPGs.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2017 20:50
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:So there we go. The big reveal of the Harbinger, which was set up in the HoE core book and was a major plot point for mutant characters, was actually Hellstrome. Who shows up just long enough to say "Hey, it's me, I'm the Harbinger. Stop fighting. I have to go, my planet needs me. VWHOOOP" Holy poo poo. I was never big into Deadlands, though I've been in a couple pretty enjoyable games. I haven't read the HoE books and I won't fight you over it, but this seems like a pretty dumb post-apocalyptic western. They have motorcycles and machine guns, and it's 200 years later, but people still talk like cowboys? That's pretty  to me.Anyway, thanks for doing this. The trainwreck books are my favorites.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2017 08:36
|
|
|
Night10194 posted:I liked the stupid SNES game where I shot a dragon in the face for stealing my memories and being a jerk. Me too! Technically, the Genesis game was better in nearly every way, but for some reason the SNES version will always have a place in my heart.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2017 06:34
|
|
|
Does literally every Hero under 30 plaster their literal crimes on their blog? What a hip and interesting twist for the modern era!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2017 20:55
|
|
|
The Empyrean Swimmer isn't a great name, but it is the greatest thing I've ever seen out of Beast. Weird.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2017 04:36
|
|
|
Ghetto Prince posted:Is there some kind of greatest hits page for people who don't want to dig through six years worth of threads? Inkless Pen's directory is good. If you're looking for something like specific recommendations, you'll have to be more specific yourself. Do you like hearing about awesome games? Or trainwrecks? Long and exhaustive reviews? Or brief ones (there are very few of these, I think)? Something in between?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2017 10:39
|
|
|
Does he act like the token thing is a revolutionary new idea? I ask, because it is a small step removed from the early-2000's Marvel Comics RPG. Also, man, two of your three physical stats are "attack" and "defense." And the third is "dexterity." What a wondrous mystical mystery this black box horseshit turned out to be!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2017 18:47
|
|
|
SirPhoebos posted:What's this about? Kevin's friend tried to kill himself. There are details a page or three back in the Kickstarter thread if you must.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2017 23:09
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:Was jack Vance good and Gygax bad? Well, Vance wasn't writing a game rulebook.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2017 19:37
|
|
|
RocknRollaAyatollah posted:
I agree with this and am looking forward to your review.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2017 20:43
|
|
|
"Heartbreaker" is used often enough to describe just any bad idea that it is becoming as meaningless as Mary Sue.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2017 00:02
|
|
|
Communist Zombie posted:Id say flexible TNs could work but you would either need a flat amount of successes or dice, essentially trading TN for that, or with an understanding of what changing them would mean probability wise and and a concrete well defined reason/goal that you're using them. First edition Sidereals was built with a solid understanding of the math. Second edition sort of seems to have been, except sometimes not, plus their whole Charm set was hosed by tons of other things top to bottom.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2017 00:24
|
|
|
ZorajitZorajit posted:Honestly, I thought it was only middling, I saw much better ones. Nah, that's pretty nice.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2017 05:00
|
|
|
Yeah, the idea of the Icons is nice, but the execution is lackluster. Even the stuff they add later doesn't really make up for it. And holy poo poo is the fighter boring. It's nice that everyone's base damage is sort of kept on par, but that really doesn't make up for the difference between "rolled a natural even? Trip your foe!" versus "summon a powerful elemental while shooting lightning from your hands and also casting knock." It's still one of the only D&D's I'm willing to play without house rules, though. It's "good enough."
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2017 03:33
|
|
|
I'm still happy with games like 13th Age and Dungeon World. Hell, I just recently bought all the CoD core books (except Beast). It's not very strange or mysterious to me that, as time goes on, enthusiasm dampens and complaints gain prominence. Nothing can keep the hype train going forever, and people love to complain. However, there still seems to be a distinction between games like 13th Age and DW, where they remain relatively popular "but…", and games like A Song of Ice and Fire that just sort of slowly slide into nothingness.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2017 21:48
|
|
|
While it has more than its share of problems, I always
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2017 10:41
|
|
|
clockworkjoe posted:This is entirely unrelated to the current discussion but does anyone know where I can find any writeups describing how the magic system of Monte Cook's World of Darkness is broken? I read this abandoned FATAL and Friends review of it: http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/piell/monte-cooks-world-of-darkness/ but it stopped before it got to rule breaking wizards in it. If no one else offers up a better resource or specifics by tomorrow night, I'll dig up my copy and try. From memory, it mostly just boils down to recursively increasing bonuses until you have +20 to all actions permanently, which is hard but doable at like level 5 or something. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Apr 6, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2017 10:34
|
|
|
That Old Tree posted:
 (  this is even easier to do than I remembered!)Okay. So. You build spells with Components, which are just the little bits of a spell like Area, Duration, Range, Damage, whatever that make the spell what it is. There are a bunch of tables with Component costs for a bunch of things, pretty comprehensive. There're are improvised and rote spells, but that distinction really doesn't matter for our purposes. Once your spell is built, its Components value becomes the DC of the Spellcraft check you have to make to actually cast the thing. Mages get a hefty amount of Components they can "spend" per day. (It's super awesome that they named two related but different things the same name.) Now, the philosophy behind this is pretty transparent: You're shooting lightning bolts or peeking through solid concrete or whatever, tons of little-ish effects as you adventure through the McWoD. It won't carry you all day through constant non-stop fighting (which is dumb), but you can keep doing your thing most of the time. However, the amount of daily Components you get is fairly generous and you get 15 more per level At level 5 you have 120 Components. You also add (Int mod x level) Components to your daily allotment. (It's referred to as the maximum amount of Components you can spend "in a day", but you only recover "5% of your maximum Components per hour of rest." Just a little nagging detail that bugs me.) For what we're doing, Area and Range Components are cumulatively 1 (0 for self-Area, 1 for self-Range...for some reason). For Duration, if you want something Permanent, it costs a whopping 50 Components. Finally, one of the Component tables is Enhance:  "Wow!" you might say. "That would get expensive really fast, and then to have a long-lasting buff is also very expensive sir!" Hm, yes, that is true I suppose. Another thing a Mage can do with his Components is, instead of spending them to build spells, he can spend them 1-for-1 to add +1 to his Concentration checks and to Spellcraft checks to cast spells. There is absolutely no stated limit to this. I hope you already see where this is going. So as long as your spell only has Components equal to about half your daily Components, you can basically zero-out the difficulty of casting it. Now, that's still a lot of Components. At level 5, you only get 120 Components, plus probably around 25 more from your Int mod; but even a """mere""" permanent +5 bonus to all rolls costs 81 Components. Which, granted, by spending all your other Components is only an effective DC 17 Spellcraft check for someone who probably has a base Spellcraft bonus of at least +15. Hey, let's Metaspell Component this up and make the spell take a whole day to cast (-7 Component cost). Now the Component cost is only 74, and spending our excess on Spellcraft bonuses means the effective DC is only 3! There are some feats and poo poo that will allow you to squeeze another +1 or +2 out of this, but it turns out I was wrong. You won't be giving yourself +20 to everything at level 5. You just easily grant yourself +5 to all rolls forever, increasing that a few times as you level and gain more Components and shenanigans. It's not unthinkable that you'll be rolling with a permanent +10 at level 10 and beyond. Remember, this is on top of any other bonuses you're grabbing from all the myriad nooks and crannies of your typical d20 game. Now, there are some weaknesses here. Anti-magic fields (which only temporarily disable Permanent spells), or dispelling. Even a Permanent spell takes up one of your "ongoing spell slots", but that limit is equal to at least your Int mod, so boo-hoo, at level 5 you probably only have 4 slots to play with after this. With just a level or two more of Components, you can jigger this around to a single ongoing spell slot giving you and your entire party +5 to everything forever at level 7, and you can keep this up as your capacity to increase the bonus rises. Expect your DM to scatter anti-magic fields and more powerful enemies hither and yon. There are four other character types in the game who don't get anything like this. Despite their wild differences, the game expects mixed-group play. gently caress d20 and Monte Cook's game design forever and ever. 
That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Apr 7, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2017 08:00
|
|
|
inklesspen posted:Hey, it's me, I'm back. Thanks for all you're doing.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2017 20:55
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:Oh look, it's The Feat Problem again. Why do you have to take the feat multiple times for all the mastery levels? Spells do that stuff for free, and Wizards get two per level! Why can't you take it once, and get them all? You only get 10 feats, unless you're a fighter, and this would make fighters actually scary with their huge pile of feat benefits to compete with the Wizard's huge pile of spells. I assume it's because, since there are no wizards in IH, the idea is to give players more "stuff" to buy and fiddle with to build their characters. Of course, this is an utterly rear end way to do that, and betrays that base d20 non-casters are hosed yet going forward no one involved would try to undo this implicitly acknowledged problem.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2017 18:46
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:28 |
|
|
Nessus posted:Didn't that artist only get made on Exalted 3 because someone noticed that there was a screenshot from a modern video game in Kejak's visions of the future? (Not even like, a cute easter egg, literally that screenshot) I don't know if it's the same artist, but I believe they're referring to the insanely obvious and bad poser art of a Lunar hiding under a table that also got replaced.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2017 10:30
|
|