Xiahou Dun posted:

How do the assassins then pay for their own stuff though? Is it like those coins in John Wick or something? What does the assassin do with the cursed lovely money that only other assassins want? How does an assassin like buy a sandwich or whatever?

Wapole Languray posted:

No explanation in the currency description. Note that the concept of assassins is stupid too, because death... isn't a state of being. It's a place. Like, one of the Suns, the whole multiverse thing that the game hasn't really addressed but is 90% of the setting? It's literally just the afterlife. When you die you just go to Death Town. You become a ghost, yes, but... you are still, like. Able to exist and interact with people. Your friends can pack up and go to Death Town and meet up with you. This game seems to assume death is like in D&D, but you play super wizards and you can have holidays in the Underworld.

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Making orb money seems to take a bunch of effort and time, hence the child slaves so it doesn't seem like something the average person would bother to do. As a wizard you probably have more marketable skills than just low level toiling.

Holy poo poo though, what the hell.

Wapole Languray posted:

Just so everyone arguing about orbs knows: That stuff I posted was the entire text about orbs. That's it. Only Trueorbs can be eaten or whatever to get you memories. The other orbs are just money. Also it's not wizard money: Wizard Money are the golden magic coin ones. Orbs are normal money. Vislae are a subclass of people in Satyrine which has a large population of weird magical people who are not Vislae.

Joe Slowboat posted:

Also, the 'pen that only writes lies' and the 'pen that only writes truth' break any mystery solving in half unless specified. You just write 'the answer is X' with the grey one every time you want to test a hypothesis, then double check with the white one. If the grey one only writes knowing lies then it's less useful, but the white one is still basically a truth spell and we all know how great those are.

Jerik posted:

The Elemental Plane of Water, for example, has an enormous and diverse city full of portals to other planes, with multiple districts, warring merchant houses, and political maneuverings. It's fleshed out with thirty pages of description. It's a planar hub second only to Sigil itself, and in fact is often called "the Sigil of the Elements". Seems like an important place that ought to have come up a lot. But no; that thirty-page description appears in an adventure that's not even technically a Planescape product (though much of it does take place on other planes), and then the city gets a few paragraphs' worth of mention in The Inner Planes, and that's it.

Seatox posted:

This is D20. A poorly worded feat can permit all kinds of insane stuff that strictly RAW is possible. There's a metamagic feat that combined with a simple divination spell to find a city will deal damage to everything in the area of the city because the city divination spell has "area of effect: 1 city" and the metamagic applies damage to "all targets in the area of effect".

It all boils down to the DM wielding a riding crop on the dedicated rules-lawyer-munchkin-charop people, lest the game devolve into utter stupidity.

The Lone Badger posted:

They also have a Poochie Aura that makes all other splats instinctively think they're cool and want to hang out with them.

rodbeard posted:

I don't know with how overwrought and angsty ever other WoD book is I'm glad there's one that's just gently caress it I'm going to eat this guy and call it an ironic punishment. I would love to be running around as a slasher movie villian while everyone else is trying out their Anne Rice rollplay.

Mors Rattus posted:

e: Basically, it's there if you want to seek it out but vampires are, by design, the splat that knows and cares the least about its own history and mythos.

Kurieg posted:

High blood potency vampires need to feed off of other vampires. And extremely high blood potency vampires can only feed off of other high blood potency vampires. The fact that this is unsustainable is what eventually drives vampires into torpor, during which your blood potency degrades back down to 'can feed off of people' levels.
Spending time in torpor for extended periods of time messes up your memories but also Torpor does some weird magical poo poo where it will give you memories and languages that you need to survive once you wake up. You'll be slightly out of date but more "That's not how you use a touchscreen, grandpa" and less "Please stop calling it a mechanical velocipede."

Mors Rattus posted:

E: the Machine is a literal, physical machine that is colocated throughout Earth and the Moon, possibly more, which is primarily made of large, physical gears. It operates on laws of physics so far in advance of human understanding that they appear to be (and are) magic.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

This specific scenario, however, isn't likely. Angels don't fall by accident. It's a choice. Not always a well-considered choice, but it's not unconscious.

Just Dan Again posted:

That would make for a good basis for a PC character as well- someone who really loved their job and was very good at it as an angel, but after losing their access to Influences and the God-Machine's information network they suddenly had to work much, much harder at it. The character could learn to love the difficulty of the work, or rage against the loss of their powers and go in a different direction entirely, or wish desperately for reintegration so that everything could go back the way it was.

...I have got to figure out a way to get some other folks in my gaming crew interested in this thing.

Ronwayne posted:

Someone said it better up thread, but I think its how people irl are trained to be less empathetic and less cooperative than they naturally can be, the god-machine just uses spooky machine magic to do it instead of fox news meme magic.

Freaking Crumbum posted:

so defense rating does NOTHING except determine whether or not you get a point of edge? that's extremely poorly designed since, as in your example, having a point of edge doesn't even guarantee that anything beneficial will necessarily happen

did they keep the damage grades for weapons from earlier editions? it's been forever since i played TTRPG shadowrun, but i kind of recall that in 2E or 3E weapons had damage grades and having a high armor could actually lower the grade of the damage, so it served a very important function

hyphz posted:

We shall hear more about that section later on, too. Oh, and of course, it's apparently abusive to suggest that climbing gear might help you with the entire climb, not just the first few metres, but hey.

That Old Tree posted:

I thought the pregens in SR2E were cool and those glossy full color pages are why I bought the book in the first place.

Of course I was about 12 years old at the time.

Gantolandon posted:

They are inhabitants of some other world, which always has a bit more magic than ours.

Generally, too much magic is a bad thing, because Horrors – eldritch monstrosities that feed by destruction – need a lot of it to survive. When its level rises, Earth becomes accessible to them. Because invae's world has more magic, they usually pass through, which causes a swarm of insect refugees go where the invaders can't (yet) survive. This is why their appearance is really bad news – it means that even worse poo poo is not that far away.

The Lone Badger posted:

The new insect spirit is literally summoned into the subject, who is laid out like a sacrifice. It's similar to being Possessed, but the host and spirit get smushed together more. There are several ways it can work out depending on the strength of the host, the strength of the summoned spirit, and several other things

* Most commonly you get a 'flesh form', which is a horrific hybrid of human and insect
* If the merge favours the Spirit you get a True Form, which exists on the Astral plane like a normal spirit
* If the merge favours the Host you get a Good Merge, which closely resembles the host physically and to a certain extent mentally, but with all their desires and ambitions overwritten by the spirit's. These often pretend to be the host to infiltrate other organisations.

Halloween Jack posted:

Yeah, the illustrations for the pregens in 2e and 3e were great, the problem was that the actual statblocks were badly-built or broke the rules. I suppose they were made in the middle of the design process and never fixed. The Weapons Specialist was in 3rd edition and was my favourite illustration.



Shadowrun liked to pretend that "extremely skilled with little or no cyberware" was equivalent to "mediocre skills and cybered to the gills." It's not.

Halloween Jack posted:

The irony of building a "fighter" character in Shadowrun is that you can spend hours modding and tweaking every piece of gear...but your entire character revolves around having Wired Reflexes.

Street Samurai, Former Company Man, Mercenary, Bodyguard...you can bin this whole group of archetypes and call them the Wired Reflex Haver.

There's another set of related Archetypes that includes the Ganger, Weapons Specialist, Tribal Warrior, and Rocker. These are the "Front-line fighter that doesn't have Wired Reflexes," and you can group them together as characters you will not play if you know how this system works.

Edit: During a brief period where I GMed, I banned Wired Reflexes and similar cyberware. PCs got a lot more interesting in a hurry.

Servetus posted:

Was there ever a standard rationale for where SINless nobodies were getting the cash to get all the hot cyberware, or decks or drones? I mean you can't fight your way to getting your wired reflexes if you need the wired reflexes to be relevant in a fight. Looking through Shadowrun it seems like you either play one of the Magical 1% or the financial top 10%. But then you get character backstories about growing up on the street. Something doesn't add up.

The Lone Badger posted:

In 3e it was a serious problem because to be a real cyborg you needed your backstory to explain how you got crammed with 1,000,000 nuyen worth of ware. 4e reduced it to 100K making it considerably more manageable.

(Then 5e reintroduced the problem for deckers)

Flail Snail posted:

Dawgstar posted:

Mostly it boiled down to the Weapons Specialist only going the same amount of times as somebody playing a support role. How it worked in my experience is everybody'd get their pass and then the Street Samurai would go two more times because the WS had to roll high to get two passes because, whoops, no initiative boosting. They're only rolling, what, 6+1D6 and hoping for an 11 to go again?* And that's not even considering stuff like the spell-lobber just flinging down an AOE spell and calling it a day (which is a Shadowrun problem in general). The crux of the problem - 'highly skilled is the same worth as lots of cyberware or spells or any other niche' - is that it just doesn't apply to combat characters. The player wanted to contribute via combat and did not feel they were really doing so.

*My player didn't buy the Booster Reflexes, buying - surprise - more weapons and such because he thought that was the pregen's deal which in theory it is.

Halloween Jack posted:

You are correct, but you'd be surprised how many people houseruled 3e so that wired reflexes worked like in 2e. I remember people complaining about it on Dumpshock. Bad design can be addictive.

hyphz posted:

(nobody ever asks why every single PC is Warframe is a skilled hacker).

Jerik posted:

Yeah, OK, never mind; disregard previous post. I won't bother with it, then.

I also wasn't aware that Wendy's corporate was that awful... that's too bad; I actually like their burgers (though I think their social media presence is annoying). I'd ask what Wendy's had done that's so terrible, but I don't want to derail the thread; I guess I can do some research online and find out on my own.

Ratoslov posted:

And every iteration of the build-a-gun rules. Those things are completely cursed.

Leraika posted:

The biggest hangup about kenders:

1) child race, pure and innocent and anyone who hates a kender is bad, and the writeup goes to great lengths to hammer this in
2) incorrigible, constant thieves
3) despite being pure and innocent they know what a thief is, that it's bad, and that they should get mad and defend themselves if someone calls them a thief (they even have a list of favored retorts, most about as effective as 'I was just borrowing it')
4) oh also they will steal your poo poo

Libertad! posted:

Yes. And the gods sunk it in a magical cataclysm when its leader the Kingpriest (who was still canonically Lawful Good btw) wanted to enslave the gods themselves and had people worshiping him instead of his patron deity in the Empire's last days.

The moral of Dragonlance's story is that the Neutral deities/Enlightened Centrism is the best and most tolerant option.

Said Cataclysm also brought untold suffering even to people outside the Empire, but some of the more obscure sourcebooks hint that if the Kingpriest was successful one out of three living organisms on the planet would spontaneously perish. The Dragonlance gods settled for a more localized genocide over a lesser version of the Thanos Snap basically.

Edit: Which btw is actually great story fodder and a means of understanding why both people are resentful of the Gods today while also understanding why the Gods did such a terrible thing, but the canon books don't even acknowledge this and somehow view only mortals at fault. I guess it's hard to view the actions of 'holy' deities as evil when you come from a conservative Christian background; it's a trend I've noticed among said subcultures, Mormon, Evangelical, or otherwise.

Libertad! posted:

The gods of Krynn had a series of contingencies to curb the Kingpriest's reign and turn the populace against him. One of these involved literally beaming up the real clerics to heaven, leaving the Empire of Istar with just fancy dudes in robes as "clerics." Didn't work in curbing zealotry.

wiegieman posted:

Who the gently caress is raistlin and why does he have such a stupid name?

Bieeanshee posted:

That's one of the reasons I always detested level drain: it was meant to scare the players, not the characters.

Libertad! posted:

You might be wondering how Istar managed to penetrate the various Towers’ defenses? Well this is answered in the form of the sneaky Black Robe archmage Fistandantilus. He had lots of rivals among the wizards and figured that using fundamentalist patsies to take them out was a good idea, so he bred magical seeds which could wilt the magic of the Towers’ surrounding groves. Once all but Wayreth were destroyed, he revealed his evil master plan to Kingpriest Beldinas and asked to have a seat as his advisor in exchange for this grand favor. Instead of Smiting Evil or realizing he was manipulated into working for said evil, the Kingpriest honored this request in the belief of “keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Fistandantilus took advantage of this to create his own secret dungeon beneath the temple where he does secret evil stuff out of the church’s eyes.

PurpleXVI posted:

I always considered Chaos vs Law to be more of an individualism vs organisation thing, as well as a guide to whether the character does things that work in the moment or attempts to make systems that will work for all broadly similar situations down the road.

A Chaotic Good character who sees an injustice picks up an axe handle and brains the guy committing it, then sets out to hunt down the rest of his group, perhaps organizing a small posse if there's a lot of braining to do. When all the braining is done, they disband, shake hands and go on with what they were doing. A Lawful Good character who sees an injustice attempts to find a system-based solution, potentially involving creating a permanent organization for braining the unjust with a strict legal code.

A Chaotic Evil character breaks a window, steals the money and runs off before the braining posse can catch him. A Lawful Evil character sets in on the system-making committee and suggests that they should have a reliable supplier of axe handles and then makes sure to suggest a supplier that he controls several steps removed, thus making himself rich by abusing the system.

A Chaotic Neutral character gets killed and thrown in a ditch by the party in session one because no one wants to put up with that kind of bullshit. The Lawful Neutral character doesn't join the party because he's too busy doing quality control on axe handles.

Seatox posted:

Even if magic works in 25th century Sol-space,

wiegieman posted:

Arx Fatalis, too. It's why you can level up, someone cast Planar Ally.

poo poo, we need an Arx sequel. There's even a hook built into the end.

Seatox posted:

Also it's nice they excised the beholders, even if it was OGL nonsense. Beholders are horrid, horrid TPK machines.

Wait, and they make no sense. If you're wandering in a giant illusion field, and half your party is maybe-sort-of-magical illusions, wouldn't their anti-magic cone eye punch huge holes in it?

Nessus posted:

I guess if you had literally only read The Hobbit and not any of the other LOTR things, you might assume that hobbits are a race of Thief Class People, but even in the context here Bilbo was completely legally justified - he signed a contract to be specialist labor for dwarves who (by dwarf law) were out to reclaim their own from a thief.

PurpleXVI posted:

All they really do is give the PC's a thumbs-up and showing them a severed dragon's head in a bathtub which is somehow still alive, but traumatized, doing nothing but babbling about Tarligor(from the prologue) who was somehow responsible for its predicament. The elves then give the PC's some magic bees to release if they manage to find the dragon's body, so the two can be re-united.

Tibalt posted:

I thought that was the point - HP represent plot armor, but an actual hit from a lucky stormtrooper still kills you until you've become a real badass.

Josef bugman posted:

corn wood

grassy gnoll posted:

Malapropism of "cord wood."

Wapole Languray posted:

Hey, I'm feelin kinda bad about abandoning Invisible Sun. I do wanna finish it, but it's also as of now over 2000 pages of text with the supplements they keep cranking out

Wapole Languray posted: