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Funny I should read that some of us like reading reviews of games that cause psychological scarring. I've been watching F&F for a month or so before creating my account, just waiting for one particular game to get reviewed. That hasn't happened yet so time to crack open a bottle of my recently-bottled snowberry mead, dust off my PDF reader, and hope I don't remember this tomorrow. Knights & Legends Tabletop RPG - Oh Gods Why am I Reading This Again? Before we begin, a bit of history. This "stylish professionally made PDF" (emphasis Julio's) in its current iteration weighs in at 23MB and 60 pages. Large-font black text on plain white or textured grey background. Occasional pictures from Dean Spencer. The first edition had small pieces of black and white art in a few places, weighed in at something like 70 megs, made every single PDF reader chug while rendering (creating an experience not entirely unlike loading naughty pictures over 56k but without the reward halfway through), and somehow made text nearly impossible to select and actually impossible to copy/paste. Second edition added Dean's artwork, ballooning the file size to somewhere north of 200 megs. After being thoroughly mocked on Reddit and elsewhere, the author had Acrobat do what Acrobat does and now readers don't choke as much while loading new pages. Text still kind of just pops in like trees in Virtual Hydlide. It still isn't selectable, though. Now, let's begin reading this carefully crafted masterpiece set in a place where strategy, combat, religion, and politics all play a role in the world's evolution. A work with a simple yet powerful combat system, featuring all original game mechanics (emphasis, again, Julio's). There will be no screenshots in this reading - the author may or may not have decided to be a DMCA troll elsewhere on the internet. Take note of the armored, plump-lipped readhead on the cover. If you're really curious, you can find the book on DTRPG. She'll be making a reappearance in a bit. K&L doesn't have what would commonly be called a Table of Contents. In its place is an INDEX that serves the same basic purpose. On it are the page numbers of such helpful entries as "Character Sheet Tutorial", "Adventure Sheet Tutorial", "Recapitulation", and separate entries for printer-friendly and printer-unfriendly character and adventure sheets. Up first is an introduction, where we are introduced to our first taste of questionable grammar and the author's love of commas. Any time you see ellipses, they're added by me and elide small amounts of extraneous text. The Book posted:The game is set in medieval Ezora [...]. Populated by Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Orcs. Each race have its own culture, religious belief, and political agenda. Note the singular culture, religious belief, and political agenda. Upon first reading, you might understand that to be the product of a non-native speaker. You would be half correct. The world that play takes place on is very "planet of hats", with each region (mostly correlating to race; there are a few human kingdoms, however) has a unified culture. And one final bit from the intro: "As a commitment to quality, nothing in this book was added to just fill in blank spaces." You know. Aside from the duplicated character sheets. And the chapter helpfully titled "Recapitulation" which is... you know what? I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll cover this later. Finally, the intro wraps up with a disclaimer. In short: "This product is meant for all ages. Keep that in mind before including violence in your game." Now flip forward to the Human section (if you're one of the poor saps who purchased this) and describe to me the ragged neck skinflap of an orc that is in the process of being decapitated violently by a sword-wielding madman. Or the Dwarf section where an orc is being cartoonishly decapitated (spurt of blood from the stump and all) by an axe-wielding dwarf. Up next on "Losing my Will to Live": We're going to learn about some poo poo that doesn't matter and then find out exactly what an Elvan Vagrant is good at.
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Aug 2, 2019 01:40
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Eoris Essence? Hey now. That one was spell-checked, professionally edited, and bound into an amazing quality book, even if the book's contents weren't really much to write home about. This is a 60 page PDF that chokes most PDF readers and is full of awkwardness that most people with a decent command of the English language could probably fix.
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Aug 2, 2019 03:58
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Jerik posted:Hm, that "be a Game Master (GM) or Dungeon Master (DM)" bit can be read at least two ways... You're going to be left disappointed. There is no "definition of terms" page and the text either calls that individual "Game Master (GM)" or "Game Master (GM) or Dungeon Master (DM)" (yes, fully spelled out with the acronym following pretty much every single time). So they'er either equivalent or maybe there is an arcane set of circumstances whereby a GM becomes a DM. Maybe that transition happens when you run the PCs through one of the dungeons mentioned in the text and then you revert back to GM when it's over?
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Aug 2, 2019 12:59
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Gender issues? In a FATAL & Friends read through? What fortuitous timing! I have something to add in that space. You'll know it when you see it.
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Aug 2, 2019 16:08
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Knights & Legends Tabletop RPG - The World and Characters Last time I said we'd start off talking about things that don't matter. First up - the maps. There are two of them - a half-page standard map and a full-page map with a few grid lines. Grid lines are generally helpful, no? Not in this case. The key is sorted by map square. Useful if you're going map first and want to find what's in an area. Not so useful if you read a name elsewhere in the book and want to find it. So if you know that Bispo Gardens ("a composition of nomerous pine trees", if you must know) exists but you don't know where they are on the map, you scan the full list until you find it. Ctrl+F sometimes works, sometimes not. The maps themselves are fine, sort of like something I've seen in some of the better online map generators. Ten dungeons fill up about half the space on page 2 of our key. They're helpfully named "Dungeon #1" thru "Dungeon #10". None of them are defined in any way besides the short one-sentence description - Dungeon #6 is a trap door hidden in the woods near Titan's Landing, Dungeon #5 is just a cave. Following the maps is the list of nations you'll see as you get whisked from place to place on your story choo choo. The first nation in the list is Lindfell, the arid gravel plain that Dwarves call home. Strike the earth ere the worms, spiders, hawks, lions, or coyotes get hungry. This 92 mile wide nation (why that particular stat is needed is beyond me) is home to a mere 6,768 individuals. Up next, the Human nation of Vancroft. This is the home to the only religion we'll ever hear about. It's got a humid climate yet doesn't really rain much, spans 205 miles, and holds a bit over 24,000 people. Amongst the fauna you may encounter, we've got dragons, foxes, and worms. Following Vancroft is the not-Japan-expy Human nation of Kenjiwah. On its 18 mile wide island are 2300 individuals who have to worry about seagulls, shrimps, worms, fish, and sharks. The nation is renowned for its unmatched folded steel. The fourth nation is the subtropical Loriwhyn. Its culture is a mix of all four races and is governed by the only "Elf and Human hybrid" that I've read about. It packs nearly 33,000 people in its 163 miles of width. As far as wildlife is concerned, we've got seagulls, pigeons, wolves, rats, and the ever-present worms, amongst others. Then comes Khimesh, the arid home of the Orcs. 13,593 Orcs call this hawk, deer, and worm-infested 188 mile wide desert home. There's a bit of built-in fantasy racism here - these abominable and savage tribal creatures are looked down on with disgust by religious Humans, who believe the gods sent a prophet to cleans Ezora of them. We'll be seeing this again in one of the "adventures" should I or someone else decide to cover more of this line. Finally, the tropical Elvan home of Elmora, its 218 miles of width sparsely populated by 12,794 individuals and filled with monkeys, lions, mountain lions, deer, and worms. Oh, sorry. Actually finally is a blank location sheet should you decide to... I don't know, make another continent somewhere. Using some Highly Advanced Mathemagic (noting that Kenjiwah is 18 miles wide and about five of them will fit in a map square), we can determine that the squares are 90 miles per side. So this 8x4 world map spanning two continents is about the size of Arizona and New Mexico smooshed together and contains about a hundred thousand people, at least one dragon, and innumerable worms. And that's your Useless Fact of the Day. Characters, the creation thereof, and sanctioned vagrancy A quick note on races. I've tried to be as consistent in my naming as the book but some have probably slipped through the cracks. Races are always capitalized. subbing the standard "Elven" out for "Elvan" usually trips me up, though. As outlined earlier, there are four races in Knights & Legends. Each has its own set of starting statistics (health, magic, strength, endurance, wisdom, spirit, and speed) which differ between male and female characters, a set of vulnerabilities, and a class list. Each race has a class or two that only it can be. The remainder are shared with other races. Up first are Humans. All humans have a vulnerability to fire and ice magic, bewitchment, piercing, and blunt damage. Pictured is a redheaded barbarian dude choking out one Orc and beheading another while a third just kind of lies on the ground. Dwarves are vulnerable to bewitchment and blunt damage (but not piercing, probably because of their "ticker skin"). Pictured is a redheaded Dwarf guy with one eye and arms that look like dirty steak beheading an Orc with an axe. Orcs are vulnerable to fire, lightning, and "berserk". Continuing the fantasy racism a bit, Orcs found outside of Khimesh are "the good ones" - deserters, expelled tribesmen, or the offspring of slaves brought to the western world. Pictured is an outdoorsy fur-wearing Orc lady with black cornrows, stone or bone tipped spear, leather-covered wooden shield, and a bearcatbadger companion. Finally, the Elvan race. They're vulnerable to fire, piercing, and blunt damage. Pictured is a redheaded petite Elf lady displaying leathery cleavage, wearing knee high toe boots, wielding a hand crossbow, and catching her evil-looking owly companion. The four races are exactly as stereotypical as you already know they are if you've read any bog standard fantasy RPG made since the '70s. Classes Since classes may be shared amongst several races, I thought I'd do them separately even though they're interspersed between the race descriptions. They each get bonus attribute points and an attack bonus. The attribute point bonus is sub-10 and boring so I'll only be talking about the unique bits. Paladins (Human, Dwarves) get a +2 attack bonus vs. evil spirits and the undead. Warriors (Human, Dwarves, Orcs, Elves) get a +1 vs. everything. Samurai (Human) get a +3 vs. evil and demons. Templar (Human, Dwarves) get a +2 vs. evil and magi. Magi (Human, Dwarves) get a +2 to MP Regen per turn. Monks (Dwarves) get a +1 vs. evil and demons. Vagrants (Orcs, Elves) get a +2 vs. female humans. Gladiators (Orcs) get a +1 vs. humans and beasts. Ex-Slaves (Orcs) get a +2 Endurance bonus vs. humans. Shaman (Orcs, Elves) get a +2 MP Regen per turn. Hunters (Elves) get a +2 vs. dragons and beasts. Assassins (Elves) get a +1 vs. everything. Note, everything we've talked about has been combat related. Also note the gendered stats. Also also note that Vagrant is a player class and exists to attack human females more better. That's definitely something I haven't seen before. Innovation! Super Abilities You get... four of these? Pick them as you see fit. Consulting the character sheet tutorial, Freddy gives four to Valery. They're not really described elsewhere. I guess Freddy could have cheated. Super abilities are split (about 75%/25%) between "spells" and "abilities". Spells cost MP. Some do combatty things besides dealing damage like launching people into the air, blinding enemies, bewitching enemies, or causing enemies to lose a turn. Since the only actions you get in combat are "physical attack", "magical attack", or "use other type of super ability", however, I'm not entirely sure how to use them or what kind of effect something like blindness is supposed to cause. A few representative items: Holes of Haunted Ice, The Forbidden Invocation of Meteorites, The Pit of Time, and Haunt Killing. Abilities have a cooldown instead of costing MP. This may be the only unique mechanic in the system - you roll a number of dice equal to the cooldown, decreasing a die step with each, but don't add your strength to the total. Cooldown 2? d20 + d12. Cooldown 5? d20 + d12 + d10 + d8 + d6. And a few more representative items: Knuckles of the Amethyst Moon, Chop of the Twenty Blades, Silent Thunder. These names almost seem like someone had heard of (but not seen) The Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic and thought they could do better. Hey, wait. Those are super attacks, but we don't even know how to do regular attack yet. You see, basic combat rolls aren't covered until the Combat Tutorial wherein Valery Fireborn, covergirl, sample character, and vampire bondage enthusiast (in about three supplements' time) fights a dire wolf. "How did she find herself in this predicament?" you may be asking. Quite simple. "Before moving on, let’s imagine a scenario where Freddy’s character, Valery Fireborn encounters a Dire Wolf while performing a random task for someone." Actually they just stand there and gaze into each other's eyes. Someone forgot to do the actual tutorial part of the tutorial. Anyway, attacks are just a d20 roll plus an attribute (Str for physical, Wis for magic) minus an opponent's attribute (End for physical, Spi for magical). If the target is vulnerable to the attack, double the d20 roll. Whatever you end up with is damage. Yeah. Every attack hits. It might just not do any damage to your non-armor-wearing rear end. Innovation! You decide who gets the first blow by comparing Speed. Just straight comparison. Highest goes first. Got a tie? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The book is silent on the matter. As part of the combat tutorial, we're given an overview of the attributes. We've already talked about the sole uses of all of them. It turns out that Agi has a hidden secondary use - it increases your stealth success rate. The only problem with that? There are no rules for anything that doesn't involve inflicting damage upon your enemy. To quote the book: The Book posted:Attributes were carefully designed to insure they were all meaningful to a player’s character, by keeping focus on what matters. Rephrased, the focus appears to be "inflicting pain on enemies and causing damage to my liver." We skipped the character sheet tutorial to get here but it barely warrants covering. If you've seen a mad lib and a scantron, you can do it. Write down your stock attributes (except for health - there's no space for that on the character sheet; hope you've got a good memory. Or you just deface the sheet with your digits). Add points from your class. Write down your class bonus. Pick some super abilities. Write down your money if you had any. Pick a type of armor and weapon, which matter not one iota as armor and weapons won't have stats until about three supplements from now. Fill in the dots for your body type, various personality traits (rather than a sliding scale, these appear to be check boxes - you're an introvert or extrovert, you're grumpy or nice, you're honest or a liar), your religion, and your moral code. It's all for RP which is generally fine but every single mechanic we've seen has involved hitting creatures with your physical or magical beatstick. It's like a weird combination of almost-OSR and CRPG. Speaking of the character sheet tutorial, it contains the first refutation of the book's claim that "nothing was included just to fill space" - it contains a third copy of a blank character sheet. The filled sheet at the end of the tutorial, I can get behind. Three copies of the same sheet in a PDF where I could simply print the same page multiple times, however? Next time on Everything's Badly Written and the Points Don't Matter: How do we design adventures? What kind of loot can we give out? What does an enemy stat block look like? (Hint: Do you have expectations? Lower them, please. Lower. Looower.) Flail Snail fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 16:08
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Zereth posted:Wait, so the average population density of the game world is about 2.5 square miles per person? That seems awfully low. Like I think medieval London had over a million people in it, ten times the population of the entire gameworld here. Pretty much. There is a good deal of water which cuts down on livable land space, I'll give it that. We could determine more accurately what the area per person is if we had more info about each nation than its width in miles.
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Aug 2, 2019 16:52
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:I... is there no fluff or anything to explain what's happening here? Nope! You get the three sentences in the class description. Putting the murder and hobo in murderhobo posted:Vagrants inherit especial attack bonuses against female humans. Females are often targets to them. Plus two should be added every time an attack is successfully performed. It's been a while and all of the author's Reddit accounts have been deleted or banned so the memory is fuzzy. I recall him defending this as "not sexist" despite there only being bonuses versus female humans.
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Aug 2, 2019 17:02
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Knights & Legends - Good GMs don't need more than this The update title this go round is a paraphrased version of what the author said in response to criticism. I'm going to make a bit of an exception to my "no images" thing and include a map.  Here we have the entirety of the adventure sheet tutorial. I can make a few guesses but they would probably be incorrect in some way. Just guessing, but green probably represents unlocked doors and red is likely doors tied to a switch. They can't be secret or locked doors as nowhere have we been informed on how one might locate or unlock them. The numbers appear to possibly indicate the intended path through this dungeon. Traps? What do those do? How do they work? Enemy encounters and a boss fight? No guidelines on suggested enemies? Interactive Object? The gently caress? Having read several of this game's supplements, I'd be tempted to suggest that this is a pile of cloth with nothing in it or a pit toilet or something. Treasure Room and Treasure Chest? No suggestions on what they contain? Things for stabbing, preventing stabs, healing stabs, and things to stab You ready for some lists? Me neither. But I've made a commitment so let's go. Every table from here on out has three columns - Name, Price (or Affinity for the last), and Description. Up first, the armory. quote:The armory is a suggestive list, feel free to create your own! We've got a listing of various types of arms and armor. Daggers, katana, bows, axes, swords, metal and leather armor, robes, clothing. What's the difference between an iron sword and a damascus sword? About 60 Kescs and an immediate breaking of the lore. Iron swords are "brittle and require constant sharpening." Damascus are "the finest grade of steel, folded over 8 times by Vancroft's blacksmiths." But I thought Kenjiwah was renowned for its folded steel... And that's the armory. Nothing makes it easier to shank your enemeies or shrug off damage. At least until the supplement that adds "Advanced armor stats" and special weapons. The next list - inventory. HP and MP potions. "Elixer of the Gods," a slightly weaker health potion that heals your entire party. "Icaru's Draught" for a short levitation effect. "Devine Wings Ale", which is just beer but somehow more expensive than an actual health potion. A box of chocolates. Some of the items are marked "Quest Item" and thus don't have a price. At least some of these have some sort of mechanical effect. quote:The Inventory list doesn't have to end here, feel free to create your own! And the final list - enemies. The description column doubles as an indicator of which creatures are boss monsters. No numbers to be seen here. quote:The Enemies list isn't limited to those displayed here, let's get creative! The last section before we get into the "add-ons" is titled "Recapitulation". It's the ToC again, but with a descriptive sentence for each section. Oh, and sample enemy stats. Because this is where one looks for that sort of thing. Here's that bit in its entirety. quote:A foe's vitals should be drafted according to the number of playable characters in the game. Yeah. Balancing is hard, so let's have the GM do it all. Finally, there are a few add-ons. Because changing page numbers is hard, I guess? quote:The Adventures... That sounds like a threat. The first add-on is a short list of "support classes" that you can, get this, add on to your character. Each gives 1 or 2 attribute points and a trait (enumerated right about now). Musician: Get above a 40 on d% to... use persuasion and charisma. Illusionist: Get above 50 to use distraction and confusion. Martial Artist: Get above 50 to use a debilitating special move. Acrobat: On a 40+, you're agile and flexible. Beastmaster: Control and manipulate on 50+. Gods, the beastmaster is OP. 50% chance to make a pet at will, as opposed to the acrobat's 40% to... do that handcuffed jump rope trick? Following the support classes is a short list of new features. Selective targeting nets you a 50% chance to break someone's limb, reducing Str, End, or Spd by 1. Two limitations are also provided - the beastmaster's OP ability is reduced to one beast at a time for a max of 5 minutes or 2 turns (turns haven't really been defined; surely they're not two and a half minutes each...), and the acrobat may only jump 1.5 feet higher than normal but may jump off walls. Totally worthwhile additions. The final add-on is a selection of dungeons. The dungeons themselves are similar to the one I shared earlier but they at least have suggested enemies (though you must still come up with their stats) and treasure. We wrap up the book with a very short CYOA section that gives us a hint of things to come (namely, you may make choices in the published adventures but those choices never change the story in any manner). And there we have it. K&L in its entirety. I would suggest staying away, unless you've got a group that'd be okay MST-ing bad games. Its one and only claim to fame is the Misogyny class and that's really not something anyone needs to experience.
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Aug 3, 2019 01:57
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And that's it for K&L. I don't think I'm going to do any of the supplements unless I'm sufficiently deep in the cups. If anyone decides they want to figure out what Revelation V is and then let me know, that would be... depressing?
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Aug 3, 2019 01:58
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The Hârn setting is pretty divorced from the mechanics. I've heard the claim before that Hârn is most played using systems that are not HârnMaster. As long as you've got a low-ish fantasy ruleset or can otherwise make your ruleset fit that descriptor, you can run it in whatever you already know. As for HârnMaster specifically, someone else will have to chime in.
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Aug 3, 2019 21:42
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Coming soon to a thread near you.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:37
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Nah, the thing linked is also the sad result of someone's mental illness interacting with an obsessive hobby. He was in his local news and everything. But I'm not going to be making fun of the author or his mental illness. That's not a cool thing to do. I've just wanted to acquire and read one of these books since noticing them on a late night trawl through Lulu's RPG section. Maybe it'll be good for some entertainment. Maybe I'll end up with a shiny new blank book.
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Aug 6, 2019 14:56
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inklesspen posted:And alright, I'm all caught up! Oh poo poo I'm now a published author and someone even read enough of my work to add a "gross RPG" warning. Off to update my resume!
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Aug 7, 2019 13:58
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juggalo baby coffin posted:something left-field We could find out how else Monte Cook can gently caress up intimate relationships by creating mechanics for them.
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Aug 12, 2019 16:36
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I can see how all of the problems being handled by NPCs could work, but it doesn't sound like the designers went that way. Like, if there was a note saying "ignore this if you want to game it out", that'd be neat. If the PCs want to help bring about the post-scarcity thing, that doesn't get plot pointed away in a footnote and you play through it instead. But if they don't do that and instead want to be Big drat Heroes in the UN taskforce, well, it's a living world and someone's going to be working on it anyway.
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Aug 16, 2019 16:04
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I said I'd be doing this and the book has finally arrived so buckle up and let's go./pic4400573.jpg) ^PM AGEStOrm Age Master® - More gameable than HYBRID I gave this a read through before starting to make sure there was actually something to talk about. The good news - there is. The bad - this is pretty loving depressing. I can see what the author was going for and how it might work. Taking several liberties, it might even be playable. All books have a cover. Let's start there. PM AGEStOrm's cover consists of varying shades of yellow and a few curved lines. There is some artifacting present, as if this was printed on a piece of paper and then crumpled before being flattened and re-scanned. There's also a small splotch as if a sharp corner dug into one spot but that's just a printing error I guess. This is not present in the above image. The spine is plain white, containing only the full book title (^PM AGEStOrm Age Master® AM@), author's name, and Lulu icon. The back cover is a closeup of what appears to be the stained glass windows of a church. In a little picture-in-picture in the top left corner is Joseph's selfie overlayed on a piece of unidentifiable artwork. Game Pieces Skipping ahead to what I would generally call the copyright page, we discover that all rights are reserved. Brief quotations may be used in a book review or scholarly journal, however. So these quotes should be safe, I hope. From here on out, there is loads of punctuation. There are frequently commas between almost every word, semicolons in the place of a few of those commas, and several hyphenated phrases. There are also several odd capitalization choices. Rather than dwelling on these, I'll just drop the punctuation and capitalization. We already know that there are issues with the text and I'd rather not dwell on them at this point. Like all games, you need some stuff (presented here as a lettered list, A-W). The book mentions that you can "try to find your own purchase idea" or "make your own with things in home". These include not only the requisite book itself, character sheets, pencil, figurines, and maps, but also a few types of crystal, the covers to the module, figurines to represent those covers, six discrete sets of dice, five different pads of paper, and then entry R on the lettered list - 'Magic-spell Statue Casting a Spell of "You Win"'. There are no losers in tabletop gaming so having a statue on the table that declares we're all winners is nice. Following the list of game pieces is a section titled "®Dice Find These Dice On Your Own Over-Searching Make These Found Dice". We need every die type, polyhedral or not, available in a physical store or not, from d1 to d10 as well as the d20. A "1-sided Dice?" can be either 0 or 1 so you should use a d2 for this. A 2-sided Dice is coin-shaped. "You can flip it like a coin or flip it to the table." The 3- and 9-sided dice have interesting statistical implications. The d3 is a d4 with a repeated 2 "since that'd be how good you do on average anyway, right?" Similarly, the d9 has a repeat 4 because "you'd repeat 4 all the time in your mind so 4 might as well have the big odd angle favoring it." Maybe surprisingly, I can understand that last one. When I was younger, I had an obsession with the number 4. Perhaps coincidentally, I randomly chose 4dX for the examples in the next paragraph. Should you wish to follow along, you can see these by heading over to AnyDice. Both result in less extremes but what I'm dubbing the AgeStorm d9 results in a lower result overall as "4" is less than the median value. Finally, the first dice might as well have silver numbers while the second and third might as well have gold. This is never mentioned again so I'm unsure of the significance. Up next, we get some Immortal: The Invisible War flashbacks
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Aug 17, 2019 03:39
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Not particularly insufferable, just nonsensical.
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Aug 17, 2019 04:59
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^PM AGEStOrm Age Master® Last time I mentioned we'd be having some Immortal: The Invisible War flashbacks. I fear I may have oversold it a bit. I don't know how intentional it is but the writing comes across as an attempt at epic flowery pretentiousness. It doesn't reach those heights, though. We're eventually going to see several terms that seem to mean something in-universe but go undefined as well. By way of example, let's take a look at the tribute page (wordsmithing is the author's but I have repunctuated it for your reading pleasure): quote:It was said a long time ago that they have no perfectly-balanced Rpg, when D&D first started and they said there is no way to make One. They would be glad to ever see One. But no one will ever be able to make One... "We tried everything but we can't do it... We tried every way." But they still looked with hope to the populus. And a bit of text from the dedication page. I'm not sure if it's flowery profoundness that I am incapable of deriving the meaning of or if it's just word salad. quote:To fantasy and founding, now that everyone can perfectly be there... and know: every dream is imaginitively flavored solid started desired tangibly, and as they're all balanced anyway... But then there are a few moments of perfect clarity. The dedication wraps up with "Thank you. Without your support and patience, I would have never achieved my dream." We finally reach the header for the table of contents at the bottom of page 17. The actual ToC is on the following page and every number is somehow wrong. This is reproduced below minus the useless page numbers, each entry followed by my best interpretation of what the chapter is. quote:Forward {}: Funconscious Faucets Scar^. Pretty compelling so far, don't you think? Conspicuously absent is the "Curse Creature" outlined on the storefront. And finally, let's take a look at the artwork contained within. The store page says the book comes "with Spaces for Beautiful Art done by You and/or a Friend as a Picturesque/Pretty Hobby Collection of Perfectly-Balanced Aspiring Scrobbling Imagery for your Fanning". How many spaces? There are 166 pages. 65 of them are completely blank. Of the remaining hundred pages, probably half of them are less than half full. So much artwork can fit in here, you just have to use your imagination. At this point, I'm curious if certain aspects of the game were removed. Again copypasta-ing the storefront, this cheapo copy I picked up is "The same Perfectly-Balanced Table-Top Rpg. Game Module but Summarized-Up and not Wholly there". I want to know but currently lack the desire to drop over $9,000 on the full product line. My mind keeps going back to "rowm" and "scar" - they clearly seem to mean something that I don't understand but my monkey brain keeps dwelling on them. Next time, I don't even know. I'm sure this isn't a pleasant read and it's going to get less so as we go. I need a beer and a nap. Will there be a next time, or will I abandon this and do something else? Stay tuned to find out!
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Aug 17, 2019 19:37
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Spector29 posted:Honestly, all of this is making me feel bad for wanting to play EP 2. Not that it isn't bad, or poorly edited, but I really like the super sci-fi transhumanism stuff. I know this isn't a recommendation thread so I'll keep this short. In cases like this, I'll always suggest at least taking a look at Shadows Over Sol. If that's not a good fit, the three other RPGs that SOS lists as its inspiration are EP, The Void, and Transhuman Space (well, it also mentions The Expanse but that wasn't a game at the time SOS came out).
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Aug 21, 2019 00:57
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Okua posted:Just wanted to pop in and say that I'm intrigued by ^PM AGEStOrm Age Master® and looking forward to more of... whatever it is. Beers have been acquired. Nap has been had. The show must go on! ^PM AGEStOrm Age Master®: We're talking about content now! Skipping the foreword, I thought we would start off with the "analogue" or introductory fiction. Again, edited for your reading pleasure. Analogue posted:You roll through the realizations of your plans being ready means you are going to have to make them for the first quest that comes to you. Standing up from your sleep, you grab at the day in denial; and the new area you think you are going to end up in. You'll have to get something for your change of plans re-bracing your old paraphernalia and strategies to be complacements for adapting and altering for "Filling" for the quest pot (or cooking pot/area pot) but it's equipment that shows your new direction. It almost makes sense, as if I'm reading an RPG from the height of the late '90s/early '00s. Something about that is appealing to me but I can't quite put my finger on it. But enough about the fiction. You're here for the game. I'm most definitely not stalling to keep from getting there. Character Grasp Scar I'll be honest. I'm not going to provide an itemized list of game terms because most of them are word-salad-ish. I'll provide some highlights, though. There are three attributes called "peaks" - Heart Peak, Attack Peak, and Defense Peak. These appear to be pools of some type as each has a corresponding "Current *" attribute. Maybe the version without "Current" prepended is your base value. I assumed that Heart Peak represented some sort of HP-type thing as it's described as "life points" but a later attribute, Heart Flow, is actually described as "health". There are a few attributes I'll have to steal for later use as well - Happenstance Avoidance, Musclenary (strength), Re Mind (personality), Movement Height (dexterity), and Spiritual Axis Revolationater (willpower). There are a few more but, fun terminology aside, they're what you're probably used to. Spontaneous Attack/Defense (whose descriptions lead me to believe they're basically "magic attack/defense"), Remember (memory), Reflexes. The parens in this paragraph weren't added by me. I never would have guessed that Spiritual Axis Revolationater meant willpower unless the game included a set of parens after it delineating that. There are skill levels, skill points, and maximum skill levels for both adventure and non-adventure skills but no concrete numbers for any of them. There's also at least four categories of something called "life climb challenges", which seems like it's the game's level up mechanic. Character Peaks, or attributes for you normies Following the list of attributes ("character peaks" in ^PM AGEStOrm parlance) is a more in-depth description of each. Most are fairly straightforward (he says, as if anything in this book can be) so I'll only be talking about things that catch my eye. Your carry weight is equal to your Musclenary in pounds. This may be an issue as we're soon going to see that all of the races start with a Musclenary of 5. Musclenary is also the attribute used when attacking with axes. Movement Height dictates your walking speed in feet per two seconds and is used when attacking with a sword. Likewise, all races start with a 5. Remember, in addition to denoting the number of 1/7 spell faucets added to your spell pool (roundabout way of saying Remember/7 spell faucets?), is the bow attribute. Every race starts with, you guessed it, 5. Reflexes seems to denote a percentage chance to trigger parries, counterattacks, and a few other things. It's also the attribute for improvised weapons (or, in ^PM AGEStOrm parlance, "random/random-use-of-something"). Another 5. Heart Flow adds directly to Heart Peak. I'm assuming Heart Flow + Heart Peak is your Current Heart Peak. Sort of makes sense in the context of the game thus far if you squint a bit. It's also used for spears. 5 is your starting value. Re Mind's only use is for blunt weapons. Another 5. The final attribute, Spiritual Axis Revolationater, is very  . It's an A-K lettered list describing everything from maximum spell levels to spell resistance, Conscious Facet recovery per hour of sleep, number of spells per day, and a few other aspects. It's also the dagger attribute. These are all described in the form of 'Thing is Every "X" Spiritual Axis Revolationator= Y'. That's a confusing sentence that bears two examples and my attempt at interpretation. Are you sensing a theme in the starting attribute values yet? If not, I'll give you a hint. This one's a 5.^PM AGEStOrm posted:A.} Current Maximum Level of Spells Allowed for Adventure Height-related Spells is Every "10" Spiritual Axis Revolationater= 1 Flail Snail posted:A. Maximum Spell Level for Adventure Height spells is one tenth of your SAR value. Combat, I guess When using a weapon, your weapon skill is half of your character peak attack guider. CPAG is a fancy way of saying "that attribute I said you use for this weapon type". Those attributes give additional bonuses to the use of their associated weapons as well. When using an axe, for instance, you get a (Musclenary/5) * 3% chance of getting a +10 bonus on a given attack roll and the same chance of 20 additional points of damage. There's a maximum of 60% for each, mathing out to a Musclenary score of 100. So I guess you have to roll before rolling your attack to see if you get the attack bonus and then roll before rolling your damage to see if you get the damage bonus. After a list of bonuses per weapon are the actual combat rules. These consist of about four paragraphs stretching across two and a half pages so I hope you'll forgive me for not bothering too much. In summary, you can do something called a "Call". "Craxl", "Craxls", "Craxlr", and "Craxlty" are all things that exist. You get five actions per round. Attacking takes two of them. I believe that various things like moving quickly reduce that number. One of the rules results in "a lot of muffling around" and "I don't wanna hear all you little nerds out there that wanna use this rule" so whatever rule that was is optional. How about we just skip the rest and say we reviewed it? There's an entire series of nested lists with internal references that the Age Master gets to consult when enemies attack while unseen. Again, let's not and say we did. It's two and a half full pages. And with that... Rowm Scar The beginning of this chapter defines things common to all humanoids, I guess. You're all size M. Coincidentally that happens to be in the middle of the alphabet. Other size options include everything from A to Z. There's an entire series of nested lists denoting what bonuses a size M character gets versus every single size category. Ten full pages. It includes stuff like this, abbreviated because I'm not typing out the full thing. quote:M.} Size M vs. Size M Skipping all of that brings us to the rowm list. The six races are Human, Eclipse Dwarf, Skymirror Elf, Halfling, Barbarian, and Vampire. They're all statistically identical but each has special abilities in their description. Skymirror elves, amongst other things, can heal all of the party's wounds three times a day while humans seem to be able to call NPC allies in the area for assistance. You know how last time I mentioned the character sheet could be longer than it is? This bears a picture. Enjoy?  Guilds Scar Skipping. These exist. Fiat the characters into one. Adventure Height Scar Classes. There are six of them - Fighter, Wizard, Ranger, Healer, Thief, and Assassin. Each has a list of favors and non-favors. Fighters, for instance, favor attacking, defending, general skills, and fighter skills while they non-favor magic. Classes don't give you much besides the ability to ask or answer questions, metaphorically or otherwise. This bears an edited example because I really don't know how to describe this. quote:Fighter So these are definitely a thing. I think if someone with a better grasp of game design and/or reality created a system based around this whole question/answer thing, it could be neat. But this is inscrutable. Up next: Equipment, I guess? I'll be skipping about 50 pages of miscellaneous nonsense to get there, though. Flail Snail fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Aug 22, 2019 |
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Aug 22, 2019 03:37
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yeah this isn't fun anymore and just makes me worried about the author's mental state. Not gonna armchair psychologist or whatever, but that reads a lot like what my friend with sever bi-polar disorder writes sometimes. No need to armchair psychologize. Finding the product on Lulu reveals that it was designed by headbanger Joseph Oberlander. Looking up his current whereabouts, headbanger Joseph Oberlander is in state care after stabbing a guy. I want to say I hope they can help him because schizophrenia sucks, but as someone who has seen first-hand the effects of untreated illness I suspect that won't happen. Now this isn't a "point and laugh" review. I'm genuinely interested in this game and I can see the hint of interesting mechanics under the layers of words. If I thought my brain could take parsing all hundred or so pages of content, I might even see if I can clean it up a bit just to see what it would look like. Personally, I find it more interesting that we don't know how many heads the races have but we know that they each have exactly one back-of-the-head.
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Aug 22, 2019 14:09
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^PM AGEStOrm Age Master® Hey, I lied. We're resuming significantly before the equipment section. Adventure Making Scar I wanted to talk about this. Most of it is weird fill-in-the-blank nonsense (current number of campaign-related quests, current number of towns, current number of no-story parts, and many more). What I'm interested in, however, are the generation tables. I like these. Or rather, I like the idea of these. This game's execution of them is sorely lacking. I'd like it if more games had some tables for quest ideas or story hooks. Sometimes a GM can use a helping hand - something like "during your travels, you run across X which is not recorded on your map" is dead simple but easy to work from. The tables here could be massively improved, however. "You reach your destination with help or no help." "You run into monsters along the way." "You reach your destination with '----' or no '----'." Skill Notes Scar As laid out a few updates ago, only the thief class has any skills listed here. Still, what's here is relatively simplistic. Back-stab when unseen (which seems to remove some of the enemy's 5 actions in addition to the standard damage), hide , pillow grab (which makes mention of stay quiet, steal, and pick pocket, so I'm assuming it either allows you to take those actions or do them better than normal), and trap door parry (which seems to give you the ability to set traps in combat). If I leave it at that and don't consult the rules for each skill, I approve. Combat traps are neat. Backstab interacts with the unique mechanics of the system. Pillow grab is a weird name but it does thiefy things so whatever. Equipment Scar I don't know how many pieces of armor total that a character can wear but this chapter does outline that between 4 and 13 of them count for defense. I guess pants and shirt don't do anything; you have to add a left glove and right shoe first. There are five types of armor presented - cotton, cloth, wood, leather, and metal. They give 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 protection respectively to whichever body part they're on except for the torso which is one higher. Each costs the same base 1-5 amount in gold. There's a bit of a small mathy problem here as you can only gain up to 25 protection. You can buy weapons but they don't have statistics or prices. Most of the remainder is outdoorsy adventurey stuff. Tents, food, torches, oil, backpacks, pouches, and so on. Unlike other games, however, you can outfit your tent with chairs , tables, "animal racks", and... game and trivia items, I think. The cloth tent line puzzle winning legend mat contains info about the most popular local legend and you can talk about it or mention one of your habits. Meanwhile, the wooden tent fact block has a sentence on each side. Each sentence has a fact; you can finish the sentence or mention a hobby. Miscellanea That brings us pretty much to the end of the book. There's a monster record sheet and treasure sheet. No guidelines are given for either so it's entirely fiat. And then we wrap up with the "fun features scar" and an epilogue. I've already described the entire fun features section but I'll repeat it here for your reading pleasure. fun features scar posted:Blacksmith: You can make whatever you want. epilogue posted:Looking at the highest peak of these aged centuries of treasured climbing, you realize that you will never make it to the top of all of this. Adventure lasts forever as it sparkles. You wonder if the beautiful peak is illusionary, when the peaks of adventure rise forever. Turning your head to the lowest one, you wonder if you ever made it out of there when it was the first one you found yourself in when you first learned about it and trained for a climb; when it was the one that said you'll be happy forever knowing you started this beautiful sparkle; when adventure already is the beautiful sparkle of everything. You turn your head to go back to normal life and start leaving the place of glowing awakenings that, with love, started you on the top of everything with peaks of wanting to stay alive. I'm not even going to try interpreting that for you. Make of that what you will. As for myself, I love it and think it's a wonderful note to end on.
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Aug 23, 2019 03:30
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If anyone happened to read my F&F on Knights & Legends in all of its Elvan Vagrant glory, the dude behind it released a new game. I don't own it so I'm going to be posing a new take on the "should I" questions in the OP. Should I drop $9 on a game by some guy that hates my guts and is so against helpful criticism that he seems to have actively made his products worse?
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Sep 3, 2019 19:17
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Gun Jam posted:Anyone familiar with Chuck Tingle? Does that mean you're going to cover it or you want someone else to?
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Sep 6, 2019 03:17
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