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Mecha_Face posted:I was planning on posting the next part of my Lancer write-up, but I do want to ask: Is the exhaustive nature of my writeup a problem? I realized about halfway through the first post about Talents that it wasn't all that engaging. I want to show everything I can, but I didn't consider if it'd be excruciatingly boring or not. Nthing just summarizing things more loosely. All the player facing stuff is free anyway, so anyone who really wants to know the specific wording of a talent or whatever can just go download the pdf.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 00:24 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 17:23 |
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Though if there's a particularly interesting mechanical interaction it's worth it to go into that sometimes. Just not all the time.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 01:02 |
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If I ever go back to the N2 weapon book I'll probably have to rewrite everything from scratch, because most of it was just me rambling on for way too long. And/or figure out how to make things interesting from a whole bunch of dry as kindling material with the occasional weirdness. But then I lost the pdfs from a hardware failure last year, and no real mood to go hunting for them again.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 01:28 |
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I'm a big fan of the 'more information the better' school. The best F&F posts for me are the ones that handle all the information and just don't gloss.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 02:15 |
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mellonbread posted:Stuff PurpleXVI posted:Opposite stuff THe duality of man. Yea, I think I will skip doing the Talents how I was doing them. Seems weird to do now that I've already gone through half of them, but eh. It's not fun for me and I think it's boring. That said, I'm going in-depth on the Mechs because of course I am.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 02:37 |
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I think everyone got the gist of the Talents, and I don't see a reason to go through every single one of them. As other people brought up, the grand majority of them are easily available for free using Comp/Con. Even the sourcebooks, since the .lcps for everything but the GM stuff are available for them for free too. You do need to buy the books to get the NPC data, and you might want to if you're a GM, because NPC enemies in this game can be really weird and fun to mess with. We'll get to that later, though. There are two, however, I want to go through just because of how powerful they are. Vanguard is a Talent focused entirely on CQB, and it is a DOOZY. It is honestly, IMO, a contender for the best Talent in the game. At least one of your players should really be focused entirely on CQB just for this Talent, and there's multiple Frames that do just that. Rank 1 and 2 are already great, allowing you to basically always have accuracy with CQB weapons and to ignore cover, since few CQB have much more than 3 Threat in the first place. But Rank 3? Yes, that IS saying you can get Attacks of Opportunity anytime an enemy moves at all in your Threat range. You can only Overwatch once a round, of course, but this is a free attack and you'll almost always be using it. Note it says nothing about the movement needing to be voluntary, which means you can have a buddy force enemies to move inside your Overwatch and get shotgun'd. And Walking Armory doesn't really require that much explanation, save that the Ammo Case tooltips provide the information that this has six uses a Mission. This gives you OPTIONS, and most importantly, it gives you an easy source of AP. As for Rank 3... Remember how I've said, multiple times, you'll basically always be critting in the late game? It effectively means you'll never run out of special ammo. All that said, let's get into the Gear. Most of us are familiar with the concept of tags/keywords, as an increasing number of TTRPGs are using them. They're easy to remember, or at least reference... And again, Comp/Con stores them all for easy access in its Compendium. Seriously, even if you aren't planning on playing this game, and want an easier time following this write-up, use Comp/Con. Okay, so we start with the Size, Harm, Patterns, and Type. We've already touched on all but the latter in great depth, so I'll skip those and instead we'll talk about weapon TYPE in depth. These don't really have a lot of effect on how a weapon works, but they are affected by Talents and Frame abilities, so they're still quite important. There's six types:
Then there's the Miscellaneous tags, which tend to be tacked onto Gear liberally!
Pilot gear is meh, it's for on foot stuff and we know how this game feels about that. I'll go over the important ones real quick: Archaic gear can't harm mechs, Personal Armor is stuff that's really obvious and no one wears it unless they know they're about to fight. Gear is a tool or item that Pilots can have up to three of, and Sidearms are weapons that can be fired as a quick action instead of a full action in on-foot combat. Never do this last one. The only Sidearms in pilot combat are Light weapons, and all Light weapons do 1 damage. Medium weapons do 2 damage. So if you have two Light weapons, you're not doing any more damage than a medium weapon, but you're rolling to hit twice. That's as far as I'm going into Pilot Gear, the game doesn't care about on-foot stuff and neither should you. There's some cool stuff in there, and you might need it if you pop out of your mech for any reason, but that's what Comp/Con is for. AI. AIs in Lancer come in two forms: Comp/Cons, and NHPs. Yes, the app for Lancer materials is called Comp/Con. No, this won't be confusing, why do you ask? While the fluff is much later in the book, I'll sum up Comp/Cons: A Comp/Con is a semi-intelligent software that can perform tasks in your mech or take it over entirely. Comp/Cons are completely obedient to their owners, and they don't have feelings. NHPs, on the other hand, are too complicated to just sum up. They're not machines at all. They're... Things. From... other places. They've been stuffed into human-shaped boxes. Sort of. What is Shackling actually? It's technically forcing these otherworldly beings to have a personality. According to the book, this is done through "Pervasive explicit and implicit social conditioning". So... A polite way of saying that the Union takes eldritch horrors and brainwashes them into acting like humans. That's not going to end their civilization, no way! Shackled NHPs do not want to be Unshackled, but not because they actively don't actually want this to happen. No, they don't want it in the same way you don't want to let the skeleton inside your very body right now out of your body. You're not really aware you can do that, but you can! I don't suggest it, spontaneous human deboning is rarely survivable. In other words, an NHP doesn't want to do it because they don't even realize they're slaves. They either think they're fine with this arrangement (due to brainwashing them into thinking that) or they have no idea they shouldn't be like they are. That said, the Shackling isn't entirely unpleasant. NHPs can see the world in a way they couldn't without this process. They can feel emotions and empathy, which Unshackled ones really can't. Humans are just as alien, weird, and scary to Unshackled NHPs as vice-versa. Incomprehensible monsters that just happen to enslave their kind on the regular. Whee. To make matters worse, while an NHP can take control of your mech so you can do other things, and they control a mech with greater skill than any Comp/Con could, they can take control of your mech. But they're friendly, right? That isn't a problem, is it? Hahahahaha you poor fool. Does your Mech have an NHP? Yes? Okay, they're super useful, I get it. And you have a buddy that's with you, like having a co-pilot who's always ready to suggest ideas, warn you of danger you didn't notice, or aim a weapon for you! Hey, did you just take Structure or Stress? Can you roll this d20 for me? What, you got a 1? Oh. Oh buddy. I'm sorry. That's a Cascade. Your NHP just Next time, which will probably be tomorrow or Sunday, we'll start on the first Corporation: General Massive Systems, or GMS for short, and the three mech Frames from that company we haven't covered. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Apr 27, 2024 |
# ? Apr 27, 2024 04:15 |
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Slight correction, NHPs are not unshackled while they are cascading. A cascade can lead to unshackling if left alone for long enough. But they're still (currently) shackled during the whole thing, and thus still think more like a human then however they'd think originally. Just a horribly traumatized one that will act more on (instilled) instinct than anything else. Also if you have more than one AI system installed (via talents or other things that let you break the "only one AI per mech" rule) then all of them have to cascade at once for you to lose control of your mech, as the others will forcibly prevent the cascading mech from seizing control. senrath fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Apr 27, 2024 |
# ? Apr 27, 2024 05:16 |
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senrath posted:Slight correction, NHPs are not unshackled while they are cascading. A cascade can lead to unshackling if left alone for long enough. But they're still (currently) shackled during the whole thing, and thus still think more like a human then however they'd think originally. Just a horribly traumatized one that will act more on (instilled) instinct than anything else. Ah, thank you. This book wasn't clear on that at this point. I assume it explains more about that later?
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 13:13 |
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It might have further explanation in another book but the bit about cascading is just this line from the AI section on page 107:Lancer, 107 posted:This can cause something called a cascade, which, if left unattended, can lead to unshackling. The bit about one AI system stopping another is in the Lesson of Shaping in the Horus core bonuses, so it could be argued to only apply to that method of getting an extra AI, but given there's no specific rules otherwise it feels weird to say it doesn't work the same for, say, the Iconoclast talent.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 13:27 |
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The Iconoclast Talent is pretty fun to play with. NHPs worked VERY differently in the setting I played my campaign in, and eventually, the character that had that Talent decided to take another Talent, and we let his former NHP become an entirely new character who joined the wing.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 13:37 |
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Mecha_Face posted:The Iconoclast Talent is pretty fun to play with. NHPs worked VERY differently in the setting I played my campaign in, and eventually, the character that had that Talent decided to take another Talent, and we let his former NHP become an entirely new character who joined the wing. This seems like a point that often gets lost when ethics-of-NHPs-talk dominates a Lancer discussion- they can work the same way mechanically even if the story around them is very different. I've seen much more digital ink spilled trying to justify or vilify the way the Union setting treats NHPs than I ever have of people just coming up with something that doesn't gross them out for their home games.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 15:20 |
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Mecha_Face posted:I was planning on posting the next part of my Lancer write-up, but I do want to ask: Is the exhaustive nature of my writeup a problem? Only if it is making it unfun or a chore for you. If you find the details engaging, go for it. Just Dan Again posted:This seems like a point that often gets lost when ethics-of-NHPs-talk dominates a Lancer discussion- they can work the same way mechanically even if the story around them is very different. I've seen much more digital ink spilled trying to justify or vilify the way the Union setting treats NHPs than I ever have of people just coming up with something that doesn't gross them out for their home games. It is sometimes worthwhile to examine the media we're presented with. Pakxos fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Apr 27, 2024 |
# ? Apr 27, 2024 17:18 |
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Just Dan Again posted:This seems like a point that often gets lost when ethics-of-NHPs-talk dominates a Lancer discussion- they can work the same way mechanically even if the story around them is very different. I've seen much more digital ink spilled trying to justify or vilify the way the Union setting treats NHPs than I ever have of people just coming up with something that doesn't gross them out for their home games. To be fair, I didn't make my own setting because I wanted to avoid the NHP talks, I did it because the campaign was the latest in a continuity where I already had a replacement for NHPs in the first place. But from what I'm reading now, I think if I ran a game in the default setting for Lancer, I'd probably make a point of how horrible the NHP stuff is, or I'd change how it works.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 17:26 |
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Examining your media is important, though sometimes you have to understand when the horse has not only been beaten to death, but completely stripped to the bone, and seems like NHP is that kind of thing, where everyone has very strong opinions, extremely loud heated arguments, and almost no one is going to budge from their position. After a point, it's just basically arguing for the sake of argument.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 21:49 |
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This is what killed the other guy's Lancer review.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 01:32 |
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Are we going to get a chance to suggest sample builds at the end of the Lancer review?
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 02:41 |
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Robindaybird posted:Examining your media is important, though sometimes you have to understand when the horse has not only been beaten to death, but completely stripped to the bone, and seems like NHP is that kind of thing, where everyone has very strong opinions, extremely loud heated arguments, and almost no one is going to budge from their position. I think this sums up the situation very clearly. It would be very cool to see the current review continue, and it would be great to hear folks' commentary around actually playing the game and exploring scenarios at their table. A lot of the time the lore discussions get so deep into the examination that actually showing up to engage with the game in a group setting disappears entirely.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 15:05 |
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Just Dan Again posted:A lot of the time the lore discussions get so deep into the examination that actually showing up to engage with the game in a group setting disappears entirely. Well when the initial pitch for a game is pilot an awesome mech and enjoy Luxury Gay Space Communism and it turns out the creators accidentally made it Luxury Gay Space Communism supported by the exploitation of a 'class' of sapient beings who do all the work, it is such an epic own goal it deserves to be front and center of the discussion.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 15:20 |
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Let me put it bluntly: Not everyone wants to rehash the same argument every time. People don't actually find hammering on the same point over and over again to be fun, interesting, or productive! aka: Shush, let people actually talk about other parts of Lancer for once.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 15:31 |
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As someone who has had zero interaction with people talking about Lancer outside of my immediate friend group and only occasionally looks in on this thread it's very funny to see people trying to stop this discussion (and I use the word loosely) like it's an apocalyptic ritual. I didn't even know this was a hot-button topic!
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 20:19 |
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Blockhouse posted:As someone who has had zero interaction with people talking about Lancer outside of my immediate friend group and only occasionally looks in on this thread it's very funny to see people trying to stop this discussion (and I use the word loosely) like it's an apocalyptic ritual. I didn't even know this was a hot-button topic! It can make the game borderline impossible to play and sometimes even a challenge to talk about, as we see here. I've tried to play it with acquaintances who seemed mostly okay but had to bail out after the intro session both times because the conversation surrounding NHPs and subsequent personal attacks got real nasty real fast, even in the group where the GM had deliberately excised them from the setting.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 21:00 |
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mellonbread posted:This is what killed the other guy's Lancer review. lmao
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 21:03 |
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Midjack posted:It can make the game borderline impossible to play and sometimes even a challenge to talk about, as we see here. I've tried to play it with acquaintances who seemed mostly okay but had to bail out after the intro session both times because the conversation surrounding NHPs and subsequent personal attacks got real nasty real fast, even in the group where the GM had deliberately excised them from the setting. Absolutely buck wild. I've never encountered anything like this.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 21:06 |
Personally I'd enjoy seeing the game write-up finish and I encourage OP to just make note of this and move on to the whole thing. If this makes me some kind of a cuss word, I accept the burden.Just Dan Again posted:I think this sums up the situation very clearly. It would be very cool to see the current review continue, and it would be great to hear folks' commentary around actually playing the game and exploring scenarios at their table. A lot of the time the lore discussions get so deep into the examination that actually showing up to engage with the game in a group setting disappears entirely.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 21:36 |
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Nessus posted:Personally I'd enjoy seeing the game write-up finish and I encourage OP to just make note of this and move on to the whole thing. If this makes me some kind of a cuss word, I accept the burden. Personally I could never stay mad at somebody who has Mr. Puggins as their avatar. Anyway, OP should finish the review.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:16 |
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Blockhouse posted:Absolutely buck wild. I've never encountered anything like this. It's definitely more common the more terminally online the group, and the game does wear its lefty politics on its sleeve. So having a deliberately problematic aspect of the setting for players to grapple with IC (especially if their characters are Horus and have a lot of opinions on the matter) winds up causing contention among groups who have trouble understanding that invoking a topic is not necessarily the same as endorsing it. Which is, sad to say, something that happens a lot online.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 23:31 |
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I was more disappointed about how the setting focuses more on macro-level stuff rather than the places you'll be engaging in conflicts on and the people you'll be engaging in conflicts with, I can't really imagine getting worked up about whether or not you can be a good person and have a NHP considering that you're already in the ethically dubious position of playing as people who kill other people for a living.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 00:01 |
Whirling posted:I was more disappointed about how the setting focuses more on macro-level stuff rather than the places you'll be engaging in conflicts on and the people you'll be engaging in conflicts with, I can't really imagine getting worked up about whether or not you can be a good person and have a NHP considering that you're already in the ethically dubious position of playing as people who kill other people for a living.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 00:10 |
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Nessus posted:From my efforts to read the core books, there is plenty of people/groups to have conflict with, but as is the fashion these days it seems quite strongly leaning towards 'use this macro-level toolkit to create your own microlevel issues and quests'. Really do not like this kind of thing, makes me do too much work as a GM and since I'm the forever GM of my friend group, I've been running on fumes for a while.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 00:17 |
Whirling posted:Really do not like this kind of thing, makes me do too much work as a GM and since I'm the forever GM of my friend group, I've been running on fumes for a while.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 00:50 |
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Nessus posted:It does save on page count but I do think there is a ton of value in these things when they present you with a basic/general/'typical' example of whatever they're aiming to accomplish, if only so you can see what it looks like and raid it for parts.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 02:57 |
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A separate, free download for that strikes me as a good balance - helps keep the book itself lean, but makes the material available.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 03:14 |
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Whirling posted:I was more disappointed about how the setting focuses more on macro-level stuff rather than the places you'll be engaging in conflicts on and the people you'll be engaging in conflicts with, I can't really imagine getting worked up about whether or not you can be a good person and have a NHP considering that you're already in the ethically dubious position of playing as people who kill other people for a living. I'm still pretty fuzzy on how you can be a merc mecha pilot when there's Luxury Gay Space Communism. The book seems to indicate that the LGSC areas are way, way over there. Nowhere close to where you'll ever be. Not on the Dawnline Shore (war!), the Long Rim (space pirates!), or the Karrakin Trade Baronies (Nobility and capitalism run amok), the planet Hercynia where No Room for a Wallflower takes place (See that adventure for all the terrible stuff going on), or Suldan, the fan supplement where the local Union rep backed a government that was all about crimes against humanity for quite some time. Reading No Room For a Wallflower gave me a whole lot of "Oh, that's how that'd work" and "That's what that's like then..." information on just normal things, but the adventure itself is atypical for the setting, the only instance of sentient alien life around and how humanity is reacting to it. A book or web supplement with a handful of one act example campaigns would have been great. Mekton Zeta did a Mecha Manual with a PC mech example, an enemy mech and a description of the setting that has them in conflict and the nature of mecha there, two pages total so a lot of different settings in there, as one example.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 07:40 |
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Runa posted:It's definitely more common the more terminally online the group, and the game does wear its lefty politics on its sleeve. So having a deliberately problematic aspect of the setting for players to grapple with IC (especially if their characters are Horus and have a lot of opinions on the matter) winds up causing contention among groups who have trouble understanding that invoking a topic is not necessarily the same as endorsing it. Well, thanks to one of the authors showing up during the last review and brushing off these concerns as pre-occupation with word choice in the book being reviewed, I have a hard time buying the personhood minefield was deliberate. If you want to see how you can thread in problematic elements while keeping internet flamewars to a minimum Exalted (smugness aside) managed to communicate 'slavery is super convenient but ethically problematic' so it isn't impossible. Pakxos fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Apr 29, 2024 |
# ? Apr 29, 2024 14:39 |
My sibling in Jeffrey, Exalted did not contain the flame wars, lol
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 15:17 |
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Nessus posted:My sibling in Jeffrey, Exalted did not contain the flame wars, lol Exalted honestly did pretty well on that particular front insofar as it was able to just be written from the perspective "yeah, demon summoning is slavery and it's disgustingly immoral, but nobody in the setting agrees or cares and if you decide to operate based on a modern moral perspective, you're leaving huge amounts of power on the table"... without actually coming out and saying so or shaming the reader like a lot of other White Wolf products of the period did.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 16:06 |
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Rand Brittain posted:Exalted honestly did pretty well on that particular front insofar as it was able to just be written from the perspective "yeah, demon summoning is slavery and it's disgustingly immoral, but nobody in the setting agrees or cares and if you decide to operate based on a modern moral perspective, you're leaving huge amounts of power on the table"... without actually coming out and saying so or shaming the reader like a lot of other White Wolf products of the period did. I confess that I never really got that perspective since as I recall it from 2e Exalted it was A) super niche for a lot of uses and B) introducing any kind of summons and henchmen to an already overloaded combat system might have been effective but it would've made me want to go chuck myself in a lake. Like it was probably handy if you wanted to roleplay ruling an entire kingdom and replacing the civil service with demonic road works or whatever, but not for the (in my experience) more common setup of "you're a roving band of murderers who occasionally loop back to party in the same town."
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 20:37 |
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EVERYBODY SHUT UP ABOUT NHPS we're gonna talk about a much, much less controversial topic that everyone can agree is good: Corporate war profiteering!
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 22:34 |
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Wheeljack posted:I'm still pretty fuzzy on how you can be a merc mecha pilot when there's Luxury Gay Space Communism. The book seems to indicate that the LGSC areas are way, way over there. Nowhere close to where you'll ever be. Not on the Dawnline Shore (war!), the Long Rim (space pirates!), or the Karrakin Trade Baronies (Nobility and capitalism run amok), the planet Hercynia where No Room for a Wallflower takes place (See that adventure for all the terrible stuff going on), or Suldan, the fan supplement where the local Union rep backed a government that was all about crimes against humanity for quite some time. In regards to merc work, I assume that its more for the people outside of Union space that get paid by regional powers, the big four corporations, or Union itself. If you're working directly for Union, you're in it for ideological reasons rather than a paycheck. And yes, would have loved a campaign focusing on a conflict that is more standard for the setting over the kind of quasi-metaplot campaign that is No Room For A Wallflower.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 23:03 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 17:23 |
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Fully-automated luxury gay space communism only exists in non-corprostate Union core worlds. Everything outside of the core worlds is the space frontier, where the post-scarcity isn't a thing because there aren't enough printers and people are busy trying to survive. The corprostates have some post-scarcity but they're also scifi supercapitalism so enjoy having to work a 9-5 to pay for the basic necessities of life.
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 23:51 |