FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

So how did the mana thing work in Technomancer, I missed that. I know the "official" GURPS rule is that normal Earth is a low-mana zone (-5 to zaubs) but in places like Stonehenge or something it might be "normal." This sounds more like "no mana before nukes".

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 07:15

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 05:49

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Bieeardo posted:

I'd do that or obviate the need for it, because being confined to one Corporeal language is probably going to lead to some serious bias along national or cultural lines. And someone with a Word being unable to communicate it fucks with my head.

I imagine one of the ideas was that you would be the angels of a particular area which, especially in :911:

would probably be seen to be fairly mono-lingual... though that was not true then, and is less true now. Is the Song of Tongues expensive or does anything other than letting you speak all the hew-mon tongues fluently?

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 09:11

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Mors Rattus posted:

I legit cannot comprehend looking at Lust, comma, the guys who push rape and total lack of caring about your partner even when it's consensual, and say that they're preferable to basically any angel we've read about in any detail.

Like, Haagenti could be way worse but Andre's completely awful.

I think it'd be fair to say Andre is more interesting and might be more useful in an RPG scenario, narratively speaking, as opposed to being a better person.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 22:17

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Rand Brittain posted:

Note: Hell is full of damned souls being eternally harvested for the Essence they produce.

On the other hand, gently caress you, Dad.

Wouldn't it actually make sense, in the In Nomine setting, for Nybbas to be behind the rehabilitation of the image of demons in pop culture?

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 05:21

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I imagine you'd have an Angel of Hemp and a Demon of Marijuana.

Also, yeah, gently caress the anti-depressant stigma thing.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 09:08

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Speaking of ol' :hitler:

, didn't the In Nomine commentary on him say that his Destiny was to become a great artist and his Fate was... well...

e: FATAL and Friends 2016: It Always Comes Back To Hitler

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 05:03

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I want to see one of these settings that has the cojones to make the Commies the good guys. With heavy veiling if necessary, of course.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 06:57

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

chiasaur11 posted:

Yeah, you could play as the heroic Stasi, hunting down the fiendish spies pretending to be ordinary citizen, but you ended surveillance in 1991, because it was The Right Thing To Do. Also everyone's related to Stalin so they can inherit his heirloom weapons.

Maybe they can ride dinosaurs!

Count Chocula posted:

In Nomine's got a Demon of Money, Shadowrun's got it's evil Megacorps - both ripe for Communist revolution. China Mieville's socialist sci-fi MUST have inspired a few RPGs by now. Star Trek exists in a world without money. I'd like to see an RPG based on the kinda... fantasy communism? It's kinda hard to explain, but the real surreal Communism you saw on these boards in LF, Phil Sandifer's Marxist Occult reading of Doctor Who, and China Mieville. I somehow assume it'd be an Apocalypse World hack.

Well in this case I meant more a situation where the "good guys," the default PC nation and so on, are in some way based on a socialist state. Whether this is a nicer Soviet Union-ish thing, socialist governments who actually aren't evil, or some kind of Noon Universe style shenanigans, it would at least be a change of pace. Even in GURPS Alternate Earths they happily valorize just about every other brutal regime that isn't ruled by Adolf Elizabeth Hitler while saying "Oh but THESE guys over here, who are kind of left of center, are creepy weirdos at best."

I don't know if you could get much of an RPG out of LF-style third world Maoism, other than, of course, Apocalypse World.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 08:21

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:

someone's goin' hog wild over the word of Liberalism here

It seems obvious that autocratic governments aren't necessarily inevitably Hellish considering that, for instance, the Jews had numerous kings. To say nothing of a certain King of Kings, and I don't mean Triple H.

Now I'd accept Stalin as being somehow in cahoots with demons, given his horrific and gratuitous crimes as well as his various insanities. (Lenin may not have been a very nice guy, but he didn't seem delusional the way Stalin got to be at the end.) Even if we know the real truth of the matter is...

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 11:07

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I guess one of the challenges is that in a post-cash economy, why are you going to go loot tombs? Who would even do something like that?

_{Dr. Henry Jones, Jr, noted antiquities fencer}

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 11:49

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Traveller posted:

Nerds are reactionary and love Lost Cause horseshit.

hmmm maybe this can be leveraged for the Revolutionary Proletariat Game.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 23:45

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

unseenlibrarian posted:

Honestly the real reason Deadlands had the Civil War still going was because their entire game was inspired by a Brom book cover for Wraith of a ghost confederate. (Necropolis Atlanta, I think?)

That's sure got a ghostly reb on the cover. Wraith: the gift that keeps on giving! (Much like death itself.)

# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 14:55

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I think you mean "M'Lilim."

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 21:34

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Mors Rattus posted:

I am pretty sure that 'oh dear god I hate Lilim' is a common feeling among In Nomine fans.

Because seriously, guys, Lilim.

The game really, really wants you to buy into how special and amazing they are.

Yeah their core concept is cool but it's definitely leveraging what amazingly special snowflakes they are. I think it'd be less galling if there had been a couple of other similar quirky choirs (maybe there were?)

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 23:49

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Your problem with exterminating all the wizards is that you're just asking for a necro-lord to come out of the wastelands with a skeleton army and institute a skullocracy. Then again perhaps that's for the best.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 08:41

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Alien Rope Burn posted:

From what I read of Ravenloft, it always seemed singularly bleak and hopeless to me. I never got the impression the horrors could be overcome but temporarily.

Hey man, enough temporaries start to look like a lifetime.

My personal favorite D&D setting is Dark Sun, even if it has lovely fiction attached to it, apparently.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 02:10

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I heard a story that the reason there isn't any 3.X Dark Sun material, officially released anyway, is because the 3.X mavens wanted to kill it because it was dumb, OP, or whatever.

Which given the support in 4E suggests that Dark Sun is actually tougher than Pathfinder.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 07:55

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

In a lot of ways it seems like the best approach to take for an 'earnest non-grimdark magical girls game' is to find something that draws off the Silver Age of comics and just tweak some of the details. You'll get close enough even if people aren't into the cartoons, and if they are, hey, there you go.

Of course, I'm gonna bet that there aren't any superhero RPGs that embrace Silver Age madcap antics, because those have way less room for dexterity-modifying feats.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 00:32

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Doresh posted:

So probably not Hero System.

Maybe Mutants & Masterminds can do the trick...

M&M is the game I have most experience with, regarding superheroes. It works, but it's kind of complicated, and that's where my crack about tons of dexterity-modifying feats came in. I also felt it tended to make powers feel very same-y (even if, yes, it did let you model a poo poo ton of them). The latter is to some extent inevitable in any RPG, because there is little to no effective difference between "I shoot a beam of fire/force/purple light/tiny baby frogs" at the target other than ancillary side effects.

Depending on how you wanted to go I'd use either an *World hack (yes, yes, you can do that for everything, but magical girls are often open ended), FATE or a Savage Worlds mod, depending on how crunchy you want it to be. Like Pretty Cures tend to involve a fair amount of karate fighting and tactical conflict so Savage Worlds would work better for that, while something like Utena would suit *World given the weird abstract surrealism that pops up a lot, such as fighting kangaroos and thinking you laid an egg.

e: The real question is how do you model the Jojo's, since Jojo actually requires a certain degree of weirdly specific crunch.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 20:49

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Prism posted:

How does 'you can never give up a Word, ever' interact with the 4-6 Word-Forces' comment that 'Often these Words are stepping stones to higher and more responsible Words.'? Did they just forget about that? Can you have a littler word and a greater word that encompasses it simultaneously? Or does that just require the Seraphim Council/Lucifer to get involved? (I assumed at first reading that the fact that what they do is decribed as stripping Words that it was a punishment.

My ballpark guess is that you can move up in the world, but like Stale Bong Water -> Bongs -> Marijuana (or perhaps -> Water Pipes, encompassing both Lucifer's lettuce and harmless tobacco) -- you get into Words which encompass your old ones.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 23:22

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Tricky Dick Nixon posted:

Incidentally Dracula's Dossier has its own mysterious traveling people who are also probably worshippers of Dracula and maybe werewolves, yet it works a lot better because it treats the whole issue of the Roma with a lot more breadth, and doesn't literally make them not even human.

I never thought the szgany were supposed to be like, monsters or whatever, though arguably their strong association with Big Vlad D. is not a sign of community moral fiber. Or is this a riff on WoD's Gypsy: The Exoticization?

# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 21:54

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Kurieg posted:

_{*Ravnos Antideluvian caught in a Week Long battle with the most powerful Kuei-Jin in existance followed by having a spiritually awakened nuke dropped on the site and a series of orbital mirrors shining the entire earth's quantity of sunlight down on the battle site. Then without an Antideluvian all the Ravnos fell into a Diablaruic frenzy and there's basically only 3 of them left AND YOU DON'T GET TO PLAY AS ONE SO DON'T EVEN ASK.}

I think the mirrors "merely" caused 4x normal sunlight intensity on that spot. And Ravnos had been weakened by a week of super karate illusion battle and a nuclear bomb. Imagine someone with Fortitude as a clan discipline! :v:

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 03:51

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Doresh posted:

You know you're setting is effed up if you have to go through Bleach-style length of bullshit just to off one dude.

Honestly I would love a game system which took pains to emulate the shonen trope of slobberknocker extended battles against the ultimate bad guys, but I actually can't think of any that really have gotten that "you beat the living poo poo out of each other and the clutch win comes from a new power, a last minute team-up, or whatever."

In other words, a fight that's exciting.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 09:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

The Antediluvians managed to actually come off as interestingly transcendent beings pretty often, I thought. I remember there were allusions that said some of them may have even diablerized the original 2nd Generation.

I mean, most of it's not necessarily very gameable and the outcomes in the Gehenna book were typically anti-climaxes.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 12:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Covok posted:

Anyway, I've always wondered this: is the wyrm from werewolf a giant worm, an evil dragon (wyrm), or an abstract force of corruption?

Ancient dragons were strongly associated with wormlike bodies so #1 and #2 are pretty cognate. As for #3...

The best way I put it is that the Wyrm is a cosmic force, but since Werewolf is fundamentally an animistic setting, that means there is in fact a literally real "The Wyrm" in the Umbra somewhere, if perhaps one that isn't readily accessible what with being surrounded by evil spirits and industrial waste. This is actually brought up in Mage, since some of the Nephandi (quite logically) follow the Wyrm, and I recall a sidebar somewhere basically saying "The question on whether the Wyrm is Literally A Thing That Is Real, or a metaphorical structure placed on a cosmological concept, depends on whether you're playing a Werewolf game which includes mages, or a Mage game that includes werewolves."

There was also a note in the Nephandi guide saying that the Satan-worshiping and Inexplicable Horror-worshiping Nephandi both sort of look down on "Malfean" Nephandi as being converts to werewolf religion.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2016 08:09

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

If these things were written in like 2001 ignorance would be... not forgivable exactly, but more comprehensible.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 22:29

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Regarding the "too much treasure," I believe it was from the days when people had characters and they went around to multiple different campaigns, so Bob would bring B'hob the Dwarf to Jim's house on Thursday nights and Mohinder's place on Saturday afternoons. So if B'hob got an axe +4, +6 versus motherfuckers at Jim's place, Mohinder would have to deal with this dwarf with a gonzo ultimate weapon and a mastery of the rhetorical point of, "Is not every father a mother-fucker?"

Plus probably some dim awareness of what we would nowadays render as, "If you give them all the tools in the world without consequence, presenting a meaningful or dramatically satisfying challenge becomes very hard."

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 04:46

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Midjack posted:

The only thing more insane than the fact that anyone agreed to allow this in the first place was the amount of gear and level fraud that went on when it did.

Isn't that the whole idea behind things like "living realms" and the various adventure paths and other organized play stuff for Pathfinder and so on? I mean, doesn't really turn me on, but there seems to be a demand.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 06:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Or, alternately, you could not use them at all because they're like Kate Beaton's Straw Feminists. In fact Kate Beaton's straw feminists would work better if you had to have them as antagonists of some kind.

I swear, Reign of Steel had a more respectful treatment of feminist issues, and that literally called the group GRRL.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 09:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Communist Zombie posted:

Wait. Why does Orbital need an Inquisitor, didnt they just vent everyone into space?

Orbital also has a 12 mile radius around Vandenberg and I imagine that area's pretty well fortified.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 04:10

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

It seems like Marc might have a weird thing where whatever demon of Capitalism there is is making Marc more powerful in the process. But I like the idea of Marc as being ultimately about promises (which are, of course, what underlie trade) as opposed to betrayals.

I'd certainly have trouble buying corporate capitalism as being anything more than, at best, neutral, but I can certainly see a large role for trading and exchange without it necessarily meaning everyone is clapped into the irons of total materialism forever.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2016 11:53

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Yeah, basically house ruling and modification cut against the fighter and for the wizard.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2016 10:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

re: the Church in Banestorm, I think "Magic is basically just natural philosophy if you aren't doing rudes with it" is actually a pretty well supported position in Catholic jurisprudence, so that's not even necessarily convenient so much as what would probably prevail in an environment where magic was real wizard poo poo instead of just occult passes and astrology.

How did they find out about magic, anyway? Did the various hedge witches and random court fakers find their spells started actually working?

# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 06:36

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Paranoia did it with the clone gimmick long, long ago.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2016 02:56

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Not really what I'm thinking of. Probably closer to Ghostwalk, only, you know. Good.

Upon reflection, Wraith kind of did this too, because running out of HP (so to speak) didn't murder you directly (although again, like Dark Souls, there were Full ~~Life~~ Death Consequences).

# ¿ Mar 1, 2016 03:01

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Magnusth posted:

Ask and thou shalt recieve

Secrets of Cats, part 2 - Cat-names

The naming of cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games
You may think that I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you a cat must have three different names
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Baily -
All of them sensible, everyday names

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter -
But all of them sensible, everyday names

But I tell you a cat needs a name that's particular
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo or Coricopat
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum -
Names that never belong to more than one cat

But above and beyond there's still one name left over
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover
But the cat himself knows, and will never confess

When you notice a cat in profound meditation
The reason, I tell you , is always the same
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name
His ineffable, effable, effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name
Name, name, name, name, name, name

# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 02:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I think it's a genre conceit so it doesn't really need a detailed mechanical explanation beyond "those school years can seem to last forever" and maybe some kind of Fairy United Nations to allow for team-ups and, if necessary, handwave why that problem got solved by some other squadron of sparklemeisters.

Like by analogy, D&D's common playstyle of "you're looting dungeons out of some mixture of abstract humanitarianism and naked loot-lust" doesn't require an extended treatise on the economic methodology that takes out that gold and reinvests it into cow futures.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2016 21:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

To forcibly bring this back on the rails, how is this sort of thing handled in TOON? In fact has anyone ever done a writeup or anything for Toon? It seems from what I remember to have had interesting precursors of some of the things like FATE, as well as being ridiculous for being a game in which you were all cartoon characters.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 00:43

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

WERE THEY RIGHT?

Lucinda: no
Magneto: yes

I rest my case.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 01:53

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 05:49

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Evil Mastermind posted:

If I remember correctly, the card game was based on the manga, but the manga didn't have any rules beyond what was needed at that moment. This meant that the original game was pretty much unplayable by normal means, so people had to come in and try to duct-tape some rules together based on what they had on the cards.

So technically the game was released, then designed.

Ah, so perfect for the thread then.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 21:47

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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