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Joe Slowboat posted:There were also some late-2e implications that the barely mentioned primordial being Cytherea might be behind the Sea of Mind Were there? I could've sworn that was a forums thing that all the writers were immediately allergic to.
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Apr 26, 2019 22:55
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sexpig by night posted:It's really a pity that the Rifts war books are so bad honestly, because 'not-Nazis invade magic land and deal with that poo poo' is a fairly fun idea. You can even still humanize the rank and file with video logs and making it clear they're the victims of propaganda about magic and all, and every so often it feels like that WAS the original tone before someone (you know who would) came in and demanded both sides be bad because what if your group is playing nazis are you gonna make them the BAD guys???? That's really the fundamental problem with Rifts*, it's full of really goofy fun "wouldn't it be stupid-cool" premises and then it's buried under a mound of weird habits and hangups, some of which are ongoing "quirks" up to…Christ, almost 40 years old? * And, like, 90% of RPGs, but boy howdy is Rifts sort of the platonic ideal of this problem.
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Apr 28, 2019 23:26
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wdarkk posted:Is there a generic system that has something similar to the WHFRP career system? I think it's pretty cool but I'd rather do my own setting stuff. I can't think of any games that have done a similar thing (except Zweihander, but don't buy Zweihander), but most of the Career system stuff isn't so heavily setting-dependent that you couldn't just use it as-is. The magic system is heavily Warhammer-flavored, but a lot of it could still be used in many other fantasy settings depending on what kind of tone you want to set.
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Apr 30, 2019 19:16
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Halloween Jack posted:Is it bad, or is the writer a scumbag? As a game, it's the kind of mediocrity that's borne out of being mostly a straight rip-off of its "inspiration", combined with trying to stuff everything it's ripping off from dozens of books into a single, bloated tome. I wouldn't disdain it for that so much if it was just the system itself—especially since Career-based WFRP was kind of dead at the time—but it flat-out copies quirky inside jokes and setting details. It includes the rat-catchers and the "small, vicious dog" inventory item thing wholesale. They created a mini-supplement so that you could play not-40k with their not-WFRP game, but it's clearly not where their heart lies and because they're lazy it's especially terrible and stupid, even by the standard of a wannabe-40k game. The creator isn't, like, a garbage fire person or anything, but they're a really annoying shill for their game, up to the point of inserting themselves and their product into discussions of serious matters. I can't remember what specific scandal was happening, but they had a lot of "I" talk about their reaction to something terrible that happened to someone else, and oh, by the way, here's this game you might like. They got banned from RPGnet multiple times, and run off from here and I think even RPGSite for just ceaselessly, clumsily advertising every place and any time.
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Apr 30, 2019 19:37
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Tibalt posted:Not in a paper format, no. Printing is no small outlay, but making professional looking PDFs is still a lot of work.
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May 8, 2019 21:24
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It was in there pretty much since the beginning as far back as 1993 when she was the face of the Clintons' push for public health care. By 1996, she was being blamed for multiple murders, Satanic cult activity, and worst of all, a "radical feminist agenda". As soon as Bill started campaigning nationally she was forced to eat immense amounts of poo poo for not being a homemaker
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May 25, 2019 18:50
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This is also the game that brought us a brief brouhaha where some people on Twitter were like "it's nice if you can afford expensive boutique items, but this is pretty blatantly just a bunch of conspicuous consumption slathered on top of a really ordinary game, and that's a kind of gatekeeping" and, of course, a bunch of people were aghast at this clear call for all games to be government subsidized so that The Poors can get any game for $5 at the Walmart checkout. (Many of these same people suggested if you want a cheaper game, try out D&D5!)
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May 27, 2019 23:37
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wiegieman posted:It's like, "okay". Enjoy playing with the 5 other people who were dumb enough to pay for the box. Yeah, they really should've suggested a true complete-in-one-book game. Like Starfinder. 
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May 27, 2019 23:54
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Wapole Languray posted:
This is such a bad "quote" I'm angry about it. What a flaccid nothing of world/atmosphere-building.
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Jun 1, 2019 02:38
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Tibalt posted:Okay, I'm on board. I love Invisible Sun. It is a potentially cool idea, but it's a very Monte Cook approach to a potentially cool idea (i.e., just kind of boring).
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Jun 3, 2019 02:01
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I really don't think thwarting piracy was anything more than a minor side-benefit to IS. After all, none of the feelies are strictly necessary to the game, and now it's all available in legit PDF anyway. You'll basically just miss out on the plastic hand. It's just a prestige thing, which I totally get as a basically attractive principle for consumers. The problem being it's all overwrought ephemera in service of an at-best mediocre game that is itself buried underneath a bunch of shallow pseudo-philosophical pretension. A lot of these speculations, about this and other things, frame Cook as this weird schemer, and that makes me uncomfortable. He's just making the games he wants to make, that have the right combination of accessibility and production values that they're pretty popular. The fact that they're mechanically "fine, I guess" at best or even just "lovely" is pretty incidental to how popular they are, which shouldn't be surprising since that's the way the this industry has always been.
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Jun 3, 2019 22:52
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It really is a pretty nice basic framework to start building a game on. But Cook literally just turned it into a big, weird list of wildly asynchronous feats.
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Jun 15, 2019 04:34
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Zereth posted:I kinda want that game, though. It's quite possible with the base game, but only after your characters reach mastery or near-mastery of one or two kung fu styles. And you'd have to add the bees yourself.
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Jun 17, 2019 09:44
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wiegieman posted:Imagine being so bad at writing books that you need to reserve like a 5th of the page just to put references to other books in. Monte Cook presents Monte Cook's game by Monte Cook: Invisible Sun by Monte Cook is utter poo poo at it, but notes and references in a substantial margin-space can be a real boon to a game book as a technical document.
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Jun 18, 2019 06:39
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Congratulations ARB. There goes a real fixture of the thread.
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Jun 23, 2019 23:25
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Another thing to keep in mind with the "how and why" Infernals took over a lot of late Exalted 2e is that they were fun to write. On top of being mechanically more sound than every other splat (which on its own contributes to being more fun to write for), it was interesting and enjoyable to unravel how to write their Charms, because it was all much more alive and interconnected than any other Charm set, both narratively and mechanically. Even most of their other, non-Charm mechanics were frankly more fun-oriented than the other splats' ancillary mechanics. Don't buy Followers and Resources and Allies, just take…Infamy? Whatever the "you have the backing of literal Hell" Background was. Vent Limit by acting like a fun weirdo! I can't fault anyone for being unwilling to set aside the first two chapters, but there really was such a stark, bright contrast between the splatterpunk child rape horeshit and the grandiose apotheosis story and game mechanics in that book, a very weird mixture of some of the worst and best of the edition. Which is not to say there weren't faults to the good parts. Michael definitely had some very specific ideas about what each Yozi was like, sort of side-lining potentially more nuanced, interesting aspects from their original descriptions in Games of Divinity. And, while the at-table audience for Essence 5+ shenanigans was and likely will forever remain incredibly small, it was nice for those of us who actually did play those types of games to have those toys. The Infernals got the most and most interesting of those toys. Maybe there were more such things for Solars by the end, after the Dreams rewrite? But that was so, so late, and it still had Mørke's own peccadilloes which tended to be more immediately recognized as one-note, in contrast to Michael Goodwin's stuff which definitely had revisited themes but were much more distinct.
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Jul 17, 2019 06:02
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JcDent posted:Can someone run down how many Vampire systems are there at this point? For Masquerade there's 1st, 2nd, Revised (a third edition that they didn't want to call "third edition"), all from the 90's under original White Wolf. Then back around 2010 Onyx Path under license from White Wolf 2.0 (a part of Eve Online studio CCP after a mid-2000's merger) came out with 20th Anniversary. These are all very similar in rules systems, and the setting information remains fundamentally the same throughout. In the last few years White Wolf 3.0 came out with 5th edition which is much more of a mechanical and setting departure than any other. It and the first books were developed internally by Paradox White Wolf, but totally according to plan and not a result of constant scandal, everything is being licensed out now. So far Modiphius is publishing/distributing core stuff, and Onyx Path has some supplements going too. Around 2006 White Wolf blew up oWoD and created nWoD, which includes Requiem. When White Wolf CCP started winding down, Onyx Path licensed to keep making its various games (and outright bought Scion, Trinity and WW's part ownership of Scarred Lands) Earlier this decade they started a stealth-second edition of nWoD which eventually became a full-fledged second edition, which after Paradox bought White Wolf from CCP (resulting in WW 3) to avoid brand confusion with their planned Masquerade 5th edition, rebranded nWoD as Chronicles of Darkness. Even though the whole line is very technically supposed to be Chronicles now, most people differentiate between 1st edition as nWoD and 2nd as CoD. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 20:12
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JcDent posted:So if you want nWoD clans, you go Basically yeah. I think you can get nearly every clan and bloodline from oWoD out of like a couple of books for V20.
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Jul 25, 2019 11:52
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There's some value in "god-NPCs fighting as a back drop to PC action", even when there's no chance the PCs will affect the "important" stuff. I ran a very fun "Dragon-Blooded during the Usurpation" game, and I've played in a number of "what are you doing while the apocalypse is happening" games, though the only one of those remotely connected to WoD was a silly Fist of the North Star-ish mashup one-shot where we all built the most broken bullshit possible (I chose correctly because I chose Mage). I've run at least two "the bombs are dropping, what do you guys do" games. It all depends on framing and buy-in. It's basically the action movie cousin to the more understated, legit personal horror scenarios like that one where a bunch of vampires are trapped in a church as some mist or whatever kills everyone else outside. In the one you dwell on your life of monstrosity and have moments of drama with similar tortured souls, while in the other you drive a car through the end of Man of Steel except Henry Cavill and Michael Shannon have fangs.
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Jul 26, 2019 19:42
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Halloween Jack posted:But in this case it's not a backdrop to what you're doing, it's the scene. Often the only thing you can do in these scenarios is run a very important errand for some ancient vampire, then stand around watching the important characters do stuff. Oh yeah, I'm definitely not saying White Wolf was any good at framing this stuff except by accident of chosen freelancer until much, much later.
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Jul 26, 2019 21:29
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JcDent posted:I'm still somewhat baffled when you read about something being deeply flawed, mechanically, on FnF, and then someone comes in and goes "yeah, I love playing it." Why? Most games fall into the loose, incredibly arguable broad category of "just fine, or at least mediocre." A lot of FnF is catastrophizing. And even for games that are legitimately, horrendously hosed, if anyone cares enough to be its audience then it typically has something in it that affords it forgiveness, even if a lot of other people don't think that something is worth the rest of it. And, finally, the top priority for most people who play RPGs is probably the social and collaborative nature of it. Even for whiny system nerds it tends to overrule "do I think this game isn't very good, or is even sort of bad." I certainly play a ton of games that I'm not hype about, or that even feature parts that I actively dislike. I'd love to have the time and group(s) to play even more of these lovely games! Sure, if literally the whole package of some game makes you miserable, "no gaming is better than bad gaming" (probably) is true, but depending on yourself and your group and your table, plenty of theoretical "bad gaming" isn't actually bad enough to justify blowing it off. You don't have to secretly want to marry a football in order to enjoy hanging out with your friends eating nacho-covered pizzas on game day.
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Jul 30, 2019 09:49
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I got to write the mechanics for what could be counted as stereotypical-modern-American-idea-of-God in Exalted 2e and it was pretty fun. Some people thought it was an atheist "take that" at God* but you'd have to time travel back to 2000 and terminate Grabowski for "God in Exalted" to not be some kind of dick. My main guiding question within long-established constraints was "is this cool and fun?" That's why he's got Darkseid eyebeams and "you fail me yet again, Starscream" Charms. * And, you know. Exalted. So fair enough. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 01:20
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Despite the relatively mainstream blasé attitude about them nowadays, they already make a good game where the protagonists no matter how sympathetic are fundamentally gross parasites on humanity. Vampire. It's Vampire.
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Aug 22, 2019 06:18
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Zereth posted:Trying to blend in with Mages seems like an incredibly, incredibly bad idea for a Demon because they are the people that are by far the most qualified to be able to tell if somebody is actually doing their Thing, or faking it like a Demon using those exploits is. And then investigate further and whoops there goes your cover unraveling. Yeah, any demon that gets to the point that a mage is Scrutinizing them is basically totally boned, since mage's get rote Clash of Wills when attempting to peel apart the layers of a Mystery. Which seems like would be happening all the time in the contest between "you can't see me" vs "I can absolutely see you."
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Aug 22, 2019 10:19
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Ain't no game, comrade. 
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Aug 22, 2019 10:50
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As someone who only got into WtF in the last couple years, I like the idigam well enough. They're a clear extension of normal prey (spirits) with a solidly integrated backstory. I think Geryo suffer from being a bit too similar, having no setup, and coming out like three years after the core.
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Sep 4, 2019 17:48
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I feel like Geryo would be a more impressive, "whoa wtf" if they were like a new/lost kind of idigam. Just a one-off couple of new gribblespirits instead of the apparently dozens+ implied by the book. They could even still have a similar backstory being the discarded prototypes of Wolf's servants explaining why they get to be from the Gauntlet and super double badass.
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Sep 4, 2019 18:04
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