FATAL & Friends 2020: 61 billion casualties

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > FATAL & Friends 2020: 61 billion casualties

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

megane posted:

Are there wizard adult video stores where you can illicitly trade your boring recipe thought orbs for other orbs containing sexy ideas thought up by minor celebrities?

Better yet, is there the wizard equivalent of cameo where you can trade orbs to someone who will then get the wizard celebrity of your choice to make up a memory involving you in some way? Like the memory of Wizard Pauly Shore telling everyone in line at Wizard Del Taco, "you know who was a cool dude to party with? <Borb Cameo Donor #44>"

poo poo we're making an interesting setting out of a Monte Cook book aren't we

# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 14:55

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 16:14

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Not that Invisible Sun deserves this level of investigation into its premises but does this mean that eventually you end up with a class of teens-to-adults with no pleasant memories, thoughts, or dreams from their childhoods, having had all of them orbed for the sake of orb?

Because that feels like something that results in a lot of people dying one way or another.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 23:49

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

hyphz posted:

Also, if you have to put the emotion of hate in a book of love poetry, does that mean you have to put the emotion of love in some bizarre hate tract?

The Book Of Reply Guys

# ¿ Sep 11, 2019 02:16

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

The Petrificati are to my feelings on Promethean what the Hosts are to my feelings on Werewolf, making me like the whole game line more for having them.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2019 16:34

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

sexpig by night posted:

it costs 50 child labor sweatshop memories of what cheese tastes like to unreliably keep magic bugs out of your house

it costs 25 personal and meaningful memories to decorate any given room

gently caress this economy.

Please help me budget this my children are dying

# ¿ Sep 12, 2019 17:36

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Since Promethean is basically "living in the Rust Belt or rural midwest: The Game" I love Petrificati a whole lot.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2019 15:54

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

By popular demand posted:

The Chiron Group probably would really appreciate Petrificati, mindless slave labour for only the price of food and minimal lodgings!

It's all fun and games until one fucks up the replication process and you end up with Pandorans who munch all the others and get super-buff.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2019 17:32

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Night10194 posted:

Human imagination cannot survive a world that has a terrible thirst for more stuff to make into splatbooks.

It still does, it's just you aren't going to see that in a book that is explicitly a write-up for more monsters.

If you want vague, maybe-this-is-real-or-a-rumor stuff, there's direct "Rumors" sections for all of these in each book that include misdirection and things people might be saying but aren't accurate, Hunter as a whole is an entire game of figuring out what of the weird lore poo poo you heard about is out there and what's bunk, and both Changeling and Werewolf have sub-factions the PCs can be a part of (Scarecrow Ministry and the Hunters in Darkness as a whole, respectively) who devote a large amount of their efforts (if not their entire raison d'etre in the case of the Ministry) to coming up with weird terrifying poo poo that isn't real, to chase people in the setting away from worse, potentially-unrelated poo poo. Like finding a place where the walls of reality are particularly thin and chasing people away while looking all monstrous to get them to spread rumors about (whatever the hell you looked like) living there, instead of them outright knowing that there's a hole in the world there and stuff comes out.

Another thing I think is necessary for context here is that unlike WoD, CoD books are explicitly presented as a toolkit approach: Only as much stuff is assumed as "canon" to your game as is necessary for the exact thing in front of you to work (hence why one of the Werewolf antagonists mentioned 'if you use Beast, ____' kind of things, there's side-mentions of God Machine stuff without saying 'and this also means angels and Demons of Demon the Descent are real', and so on). So hey, maybe the forests ARE haunted by a weird Promethean stump-monster-maker, or maybe it's just a rumor someone else started. I don't think a book billed as a list of antagonists is going to have "except there's nothing there" as the conclusion, though, sorry to say.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2019 22:13

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Mors Rattus posted:

Generally speaking, Pandorans go dormant a lot. There's not a ton of Prometheans out there. But the dumb ones can pretend to be an inanimate object for decades, and the smart ones are usually good at tracking their food sources;' both types can sense when a Promethean comes within like 50 miles of them.

Also, can't Sublimati (who are just Smart Pandorans basically) also eat people for a tiiiiny bit of Pyros, as a trade-off for being semi-sentient?

# ¿ Sep 18, 2019 19:33

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Geist rules, when you're done with it That Old Tree, do yourself a favor and skim the 1e core book and see how much stuff that's great in 2e isn't there in the first edition
including rules for interacting with your Geist in any way, or having anything at all to do or any conflicts baked into the setting.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 01:58

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Halloween Jack posted:

Mummy was originally a supplement for Vampire, and I have no idea why they were spun off into their own product line, with a completely burn-it-down-and-rebuild-it new mythos that nobody asked for. I may eventually review M:tR out of spite.

Mummy's entire thing in every single iteration across both WoD and CoD have

quote:

I have no idea why they were spun off into their own product line, with a completely burn-it-down-and-rebuild-it new mythos that nobody asked for.

as the unifying concept. God what a mess, always.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 16:06

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Halloween Jack posted:

What I mean is, Mummies were originally a breed apart from the standard WoD formula. Your PCs have been crossing between the mortal and spirit worlds for thousands of years. There were also no splats, just political factions with no mechanical differences between them.

When they made Mummy: the Resurrection, they decided that the metaplot origin should be all the Mummies getting blown to astral smithereens. Now Mummies are people who became monsters last week, with splats, like every other White Wolf game. I've never met anyone who could argue that the game had any reason to exist, even for people who were already WoD junkies.

Oh THAT

Yeah no that's super hosed up and weird. Just post imo

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 16:16

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Kaza42 posted:

nuVamp isn't really boring, but there is less content so you're going to see less discussion of them in a review thread. Personally, I vastly prefer nuvamp over oldvamp

Yeah, also nuVamp doesn't really lend itself to beer-and-pretzels-and-popcorn-and- :gonk:

the same way oVamp does, so it doesn't drive as much discussion when it's here. And it's probably the smallest divergence from oVamp compared to how Mage and Werewolf take huge leaps away from Ascension and Apocalypse, respectively.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 21:09

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Dawgstar posted:

Well, Kailindo was too powerful.

Also having three axis-splats (Breed for Gnosis, Tribe for Willpower, Auspice for Rage) and Stargazers being the only ones who got 5 Willpower.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2019 00:54

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Kurieg posted:

And then they tried to bring the weird sex obsessed furries market back in with Changing Breeds for some inscrutable reason.

I would argue the reason is very scrutable

# ¿ Sep 24, 2019 15:12

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

JcDent posted:

Also, how do Sin-Eaters know that the Underworld is bad and not just functioning-as-intended? How much can they do to change what are probably it's physics?

Because it's so bad, in so many ways, that if that's the intended function, and you have any knowledge whatsoever of it without being stuck in it, it's absolutely your moral imperative to change it at all costs.

And: A lot, as it happens.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2019 20:26

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

I think more than anything, the Zeky in 2e suffer from having to graft some sort of granular micro-radiation system for "what if Disquiet, but radioactive too" onto the existing CoD 2e rules for radiation that treat radiation as an environmental hazard (and thus, a pretty basic check on "here's a thing to prep for and avoid and if you don't this is the bad thing that happens"). So you end up with rules for a campaign setpiece having to float atop some napkin-math for what's ostensibly a playable character type.

You could hack it into (Azoth - Pilgrimage)/2 = Intensity in a scene during which you spent Pyros, but even then it's not addressing the underlying WoD/CoD problem of rules that love to be rules-lite until they suddenly decide to be very, very crunchy.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2019 20:23

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

wiegieman posted:

Other things Demons like to buy: histories of larceny or violence, because having a Cover who does those things is very useful to them.

Also, since Demons care more about hiding from Angels than they do hiding from mortal consequences (mostly), if you have the cover of someone who behaves like a desperate guns-first psycho, you are A+ golden.

Spector29 posted:

The fact that Demon doesn't have a Morality stat in favor of a "Acting in Character" stat is what sold a lot of my players on the game. It's a good feature.

Demons are the "it's In Character for me to do that, so, it's ok" splat and I love them for it

# ¿ Sep 27, 2019 01:58

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Man, the Mayor rules. Exactly what you love to see out of a Night Horrors entry: enough plot hooks to flesh out an entire campaign, without necessarily forcing direct confrontation, while at the same time having ample opportunities for that (in all the angels around the perimeter if nothing else). Also the "just take the next person to be elected to the office as your new Cover" idea is super-good. The self-made Manchurian candidate.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2019 17:49

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Freaking Crumbum posted:

does a demon have to know that it's a demon? they fall from being angels and lose almost all of their memory about their old powers and resources and about the god machine, but does the resulting being always 100% know that it's a demon? the fiction makes it sound like every single demon has a perfect idea of why it fell and when, but it seems like you could reasonably play a character that believes, for all intents and purposes, that they are suddenly beginning to manifest hones-to-god super powers following whatever freak accident caused them to fall, but completely misattributing the source of their powers and their very existence to the wrong thing. like they realize that by sleeping in this specific abandoned factory, in the morning their powers have recharged, and assume that must be their fortress of solitude instead of understanding "oh no there's just some hidden leaky infrastructure here that bleeds out magic juice and i'm latently absorbing said juice when i spend the night here". then the angels that get sent after them start to look like super villains with even weirder powers and it becomes sort of a self fulfilling prophecy.

i guess a lot of the intentional mechanics like covers and bargains have to either be ignored or completely reflavored in this theoretical context.

Demons' thing is that the legacy of being an Angel gives them perfect memory and also perfect, deliberate control of everything they do, such that they are undetectable liars. At least, by default---we've already seen one antagonist in Enemy Action where the former isn't the case, so it's doable.

Really, I think what you're talking about could be covered pretty well under Deviant, the upcoming game (currently being Kickstarted). In that you play people that were accidentally or on-purpose soul-broken such that they turned into weird mutants, and one of the power sources is otherworldly energy. So you could very easily build someone who accidentally got GM Juiced, and without the knowledge of the Demon setting just assumes that those weird robomonsters coming after then are supervillains or whatever.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2019 02:23

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

The Lone Badger posted:

So they can't speak Esperanto or Klingon.

You got enough year-round ren faires in your setting and they can speak fluent Tolkien-Elvish, though.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2019 03:50

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

8one6 posted:

These Demon NPCs have been way more interesting to me than the Promethian ones. I'm honestly tempted to pick up Demon now.

The really cool thing to me with Demon is that, as others have said, how many of the angel NPCs are written with potential hooks for making them fall. Which may not make them not an antagonist anymore, but definitely makes them an antagonist without GM backing.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2019 19:27

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Angels get more like people the longer they pretend to be people. If they get comfy enough in that role, they have a very strong tendency to Fall. This is part of why the God-Machine routinely deconstructs angels and builds new ones from the parts rather than keep using the same one indefinitely -- but with occasional exceptions for very unique or expensive functions.

Yeah it's like how older OS's work worse the longer you go without disk defragmenting, except with forming emotional connections and gradually developing an internal life.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2019 19:47

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

PantsOptional posted:

So, this... exists: https://www.feastoflegends.com/

Wendy's made a 97 loving page tabletop RPG with full color illustrations, a sizeable adventure, and a map. From cursory examination, it looks surprisingly decent. Apparently they have physical copies at NYCC.

Someone please, please do a writeup. I beg you.

You can tell it's a real game because it's got DND stats except different names and 5 instead of 6. Some thought and effort was actually put into this. What the gently caress.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2019 21:44

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Bieeanshee posted:

Do Deviant origins have any mechanical effect? Because... I dunno, that reads like someone just rattled off a list of basic superhero themes.

They do! Depending on your origin you get a free dot of either a Subtle or Overt Variation (Variations are the powers, Subtle vs Overt is what it sounds like), without an attendant level of Scar (the mandatory flaws/trade-offs). So you can either get a 1-dot version of something with no weakness to it at all, or bump something up higher with less of an associated risk.

Also they give you a dot of either Loyalty or Conviction, which is just, better described as 'when the write-up gets there.'

Basically it breaks down as:
Free Subtle, 1 Loyalty
Free Overt, 1 Loyalty
Free Subtle, 1 Conviction
Free Overt, 1 Conviction
(Mutant) - Pick 1 free of whatever and 1 Loyalty or Conviction, but also get a separate weakness for this versatility.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2019 17:40

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

I love and respect The Infinite Goat

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 18:38

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Shauna Jones Did Nothing Wrong

# ¿ Oct 11, 2019 16:01

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

(said while gesturing to a pile of Mage books)

Mors Rattus posted:

Essentially, most of the problems in this book are, to some degree, the fault of wizards deciding they can handle something and then doing some extremely stupid poo poo.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2019 16:29

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Joe Slowboat posted:

The Exarchs are rear end in a top hat rules designers, the God-Machine is the rear end in a top hat GM, and the Abyss is an rear end in a top hat player who intentionally screws with the rules to make everyone at the table unhappy because they want the game to die but won�t be honest about it.

Scelesti are therefore "well MY CHARACTER would do this," players, which makes a lot of sense.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2019 20:11

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

I liked the part of the Ravenloft novels where there's this ongoing thread of Strahd (undead with magic powers, cursed with dying kingdom), Soth (undead with magic powers, cursed with dying kingdom) and Azalin (undead with magic powers, cursed with dying kingdom) are all slap-fighting over who has it worst, who is smarter than their curse, who will rue the day they crossed the other one, etc.

Unfortunately, this points to the key fact that the whole setting reads better as "Monsterhearts where no one's loving" than as a place for adventures and adventurers.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2019 19:14

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:

Even tho - probably unfortunately, because I can't imagine the D&D take on horror sex from the 90s is any good - this is apparently not true, I'd actually be fine with "Monsterhearts where no one's loving" if the point is to be horror fantasy and not Monsterhearts (a game about human relationships).

A horror setting, literally the demiplane of horror and bad feelings in this case, shouldn't be full of pleasant stuff and people enjoying life's joys. Which means it can write sexuality one of two ways: downplaying it because everyone's miserable and lonely and alienated and not getting it, or by focusing on the darker aspects of sexuality - exploitation, pain, abuse. As games go, D&D is really one that should tread lightly around the latter, and not one that I trust to explore those themes intelligently and ethically. A pretty sexless Ravenloft makes sense to me.

Yeah I was mostly joking about the fact that Ravenloft as a fiction setting is written about the petty politicking and whiny slapfights of (in/vol)cel ghouls, while Ravenloft as a game setting is "You find yourself in the Spooky Woods. If you're lucky you won't run into Count Spooky, who has a dozen levels on you and can't die". But also, agreed.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2019 20:35

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Night10194 posted:

There's also just the fact that D&D has very loose out of combat rules at best. So any of this is usually left to the individual gaming group.

I'm inclined to think that this is largely not the case of the rules being loose, but more that the out-of-combat rules are the ones people are most likely to handwave or not learn, because you're here for the combat and spells (unless you're the rogue, in which case you are here for a few skill checks too)
AD&D/2e: Has proficiencies, and if you're a rogue, a codified list of explicitly what your percentile chance is for any given roguely task.
3x: Massive list of skills and an even longer list of the expected DCs for any of them, including the infamous "can't recognize a bear untrained" situation
4e: Has skill challenge rules for complex situations, and straight up says "if it's an obstacle that would only require one roll to bypass, it's just one roll, not a skill challenge" and lists examples.
5e: Like a slightly vaguer 3e, but probably owing more to not having a thousand sourcebooks defining every inch of playable surface than any design decision.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2019 23:51

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Leraika posted:

4e was bear lore tho

Cool, is my point inaccurate?

# ¿ Dec 4, 2019 00:03

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

That Old Tree posted:

The crew that came up with the game did so as they were driving to GenCon, part of which through the economically blighted Gary. It may have started there, in fact. I can't remember. MRH tells the story in the terminally mediocre WoD documentary.

Without listening to MRH I would assume that their trip from Georgia to Lake Geneva, WI took them through Gary just before Chicago, and the part of Gary you hit before Chicago is just truly cursed. It smells like old iron mill (because: it is), it's very poorly-lit for being a major highway, and it's flat ground level in enough places that people will just be running across it while you're driving 70. Also, feral dogs.

If oWoD is a suburban white lens through which to be afraid of The Other, Gary is a fantastic place to just be passing through.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2019 01:48

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

JcDent posted:

Out-of-sequence post: does anyone have any questions/suggestions/requests w/r/t Cult Ranks in Degenesis? I already have the next post down, but if anyone's interested in anything specific (say, gear you auto-get, Cult Potentials, requirements, NSFW char art etc.), I'll be down to post.

Yeah what's up with the Palers?

# ¿ Dec 24, 2019 18:49

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

JcDent posted:

Anything in particular?

They have at least one bit of interesting stuff that I remember, yes...

Really anything, but especially whatever Potentials they get. Very curious to see what's up with albino vault-dwellers.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2019 19:57

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Eclipse Phase feels like a setting where the most moral choice is sticking your brain in a floppy disc, shooting it as far across the universe as it'll go, and deleting your memories of Earth once you get there.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2019 03:41

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

hyphz posted:

A very experimental F&F...

Fatal & Friends: Tokyo Coin Laundry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxFb5FRVGLc

This video is good, but even if it were bad, it would be better than this game deserves. Feels like character generation in search of a system, while simultaneously being a spatial relations game that doesn't care about getting to that point reliably. Weird poo poo.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2020 00:22

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

I'm the most interested in the spare Burning Wheel (?) token in the box, violating the prime rule of game design: don't remind me of better games I should be playing instead.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2020 00:26

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 16:14

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

This is the most FATAL and Friends thing I've seen outside of this thread, for almost every value.

https://twitter.com/deathbybadger/status/1234423909434392577

# ¿ Mar 3, 2020 02:40

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