FATAL & Friends 2020: 61 billion casualties

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

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

_{_{welcome to the neo-night future chumboozas, try not to get berked by devil inc}}

It's Alien Rope Burn here with another a-round of FATAL & Friends, often duplicated, never surpassed. This is a thread where we review, comment, and let's read on RPGs, but occassionally bring up other sorts of tabletop games. It is a rabbit hole where people care about the relative value of Dexterity, like, a lot. Inspired loosely by Darren MacLennan and Jason Sartin's rpg.net reviews of Synnibarr and FATAL, this thread is mostly about doing long-form reviews of fun games, offensive games, and everything inbetween. This all gets dangerously inside elfball, and sometimes can get offensive and gross with some of the games that get discussed. For a long while I was content to leave this as a wild west of turbonerd opinions, but we're cleaning things up a little. But not much.

:siren:

As a reminder, there's inklesspen's Official FATAL & Friends Site� :siren:

If you're wondering if something's already been reviewed, check inklesspen's Official FATAL & Friends Site�. :siren:

If you're looking for an old review, check inklesspen's Official FATAL & Friends Site�. :siren:

As somebody that used to have to hand-link all my own reviews on the now depreciated SA Traditional Games Wiki, I really appreciate the work she does to preserve our commentaries. :golfclap:

So you want to post a review. That's great!

Some things to keep in mind. These are rules.

Always include a number and title for your commentary. A header image is better if you can manage it. But otherwise, just bold and/or underline the title of your review in every post, and include what number is in the commentary series. This helps inklesspen archive your posts.
Please don't reply to posts in the same post as your commentary. Otherwise, inklesspen has to cut out that part of the post, and that makes her job harder. If you're replying in the ext of the commentary itself, that's fine, but casual replies to posts should be included in separate posts.
If you have questionable content - anything Not Safe For Work - spoiler that. Swear words and occasional references to the occasional gross act is one thing, but if you're quoting long bits of ribald text from Sheathfinger: Exploring the Netherrealms for Levels 1-20, you probably want to spoiler that. If you're including images from Sheathfinger, it's even better to have a link to the image with an appropriate warning rather than just using tags.
Avoid just rephrasing the book you're commenting on. That isn't a review, it's not a commentary, it's just regurgitation. If you don't have something to say about a book and you just want to share it, donate a copy to a library.
This isn't a place to troll or settle personal grudges. Granted, the line here can be hard to draw with our tradition of shenanigans and hijinks, but some people have come in deliberately trying to go against the grain to prove a point to noone. And if you have a axe to grind, that's understandable, there are a lot of bad designers! But a bad game is just a bad game, so let's keep that in perspective, no amount of shoddy rules will destroy this hobby. D&D proved that. And this is a place more to talk about the games themselves than lovely people in the industry, as we have an industry thread for that!

_{Quick suggestions maybe somebody will listen to: don't try and make posts too long, break up your text with titles / quotes / images, don't post too often or people won't be able to keep up, write as much of your review as you feel comfortable with in advance, ask permission if you want to finish somebody else's review, and let us know if a review isn't going to be finished if possible.}

A good example:

quote:

Top Gear d20 Part 3: Why Volkswagens are a Trap Option

Last time we covered how BMWs break the system over their knee with their Reliability Modifier. So you'd think Reliability Modifiers are like, the best thing, then, right? Let's talk about how the Volkswagen shows how this system can go wrong.

A bad example:

quote:

BugFetish posted:
Spiders' extra pair of legs doesn't break the system, their penalties offset the extra action their extra limbs give them. It's centipedes that break the system, at least until they forget what die they assigned to each leg and break the game.

Look, remembering what dice you have assigned to each leg is a balancing factor, centipedes are fine because nobody can remember which of their hundred dice they assigned, and so they get the dilemma penalty, but spider players can always remember now many more legs they have other than wasps and use their d20s for each leg roll in Bugs & Backyards, unlike centipedes that are all d4s and d5s and dΠ...

CarLover posted:
finish top gear already

Anyway, I guess I still have this Top Gear review to finish...

Last time we covered how BMWs break the system over their knee with their Reliability Modifier. So you'd think Reliability Modifiers are like, the best thing, then, right? Let's talk about how the Volkswagen shows how this system can go wrong...

Previous threads (may require archives upgrade) were:

Every so often the question comes up: "Should I write up-" and the answer is always yes, unless it's fantastically inappropriate in some sense. It doesn't have to be a bad game to talk about. If a review has been done before, you can do it again if you want. It doesn't have to be a professionally published game. Don't worry, people will love or hate your thing and trying to science what people will love is- you can't science love.

:justpost:

Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Mar 14, 2021

# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 01:46

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 05:08

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

The thing about the Orbs that strikes me is it's this weird idea that could have interesting implications, like trying to find that one person with a dream that's worth a lot of $$$. But is it right to steal that dream for profit? Maybe you think preserving it is more valuable than the possibility of its fruition though that person's actions? Like, could you sell your own ambitions? Etc.

But Monte seemingly has no interest in that, it's just a curious form of currency. Weirdly still, because of the D&D mindset that A) money is an in-game reward and B) in-game rewards are only granted through adventure, PCs are deliberately shoved out of the space. "Uhhh you can only make this in factories involving a million billion children having their dreams stolen, don't try and do it yourselves!" Weirder still, this excuse raises more questions I'm not sure are answered, like "Wouldn't anybody with a basic ethical structure want to stop this? Wouldn't it be towards the top of your wizard societal reform platform?"

The thing about Invisible Sun's weirdness is that it just seems shallow, a prop rather than anything to engage seriously with. It's just a standard RPG with a bunch of non-sequiturs tied on to try and intrigue you. "This buxom woman has a book for a face?! Isn't that interesting?" "Oh, can she only see words or maybe her thoughts are on the page or-" "Oh no she can see and talk normally she just has a book for face which means something maybe what does it meeeean?"

# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 16:01

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Wapole Languray posted:

I remember when I got a invisible chair, I thought I'd like fake people out and make think think I'm hovering, but... like, you bash your knee on it all the time, and then there was the time I knocked it over and thought I'd put it right-side up but it was actually on its back and I tried to sit down and fell over. And they don't tell you how you have to keep it clean; if any like, dust or dirt falls on the thing, you just see it hovering there. I threw it away and then realized I could have given it to Goodwill if they believe it exists, but could never find it again. Don't know if somebody took it or I just lost it.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2019 16:52

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

SunAndSpring posted:

In any case, it just feels like everything I�m interested in has been done or isn�t of interest to anyone but fans of a line, and that every time I try, I get bugged about it in a way that makes me feel like a gently caress-up.

It's fine, but I'd put in a caveat that you're discussing it based on a in-progress version, and probably link directly to the Kickstarter at some point. (I can't tell if you did at this point, of course.)

If something's out in the wild, I don't really have an issue as long as it's represented fairly, I'd have issues if it were an attempt at Kickstarter sabotage or if you were deliberately breaking an NDA. But neither seems to be the case here. How a company markets and funds a game is generally up to them, in my opinion, and something like prereleases are ultimately just a part of that marketing.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 14:06

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Night10194 posted:

I don't think many people who give things a bad review are doing it because they 'want them to fail'.

I'm just dealing in hypotheticals before somebody thinks it's a good idea.

We are on the internet, after all.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 14:39

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

NDAs only really matter if you signed them. Granted, it's a different situation when something licensed leaks during production, but with something like Dark Heresy it's been out in the wild long enough that unless you personally marked off on the dotted line, it's not an issue, and even then I doubt it matters too much because both game line and license is effectively dead.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 15:18

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

FoldableHuman posted:

I wonder if this was intentional, or if all the dragons are off-model in general because it's not an official WotC book. They might have rules about this, just like with Mindflayers and Beholders.

There aren't any rules strictly forbidding it, but more importantly there aren't any rules in the OGL license allowing it, which is what you're really need. Though the OGL is pretty vague, it can be clear from other period references like the old OGL FAQ put out by Wizards that it only refers to text. So borrowing art designs without explicit permission of the rights holder would be a whole other legal situation. IANAL, of course.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2020 01:00

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Sometimes you can just tell when I've finally caught up with the thread.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2020 01:42

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

I remember this guy who was troublingly obsessed with parasitic fungi from my time on grogs.txt, I think he took down his blog of his many homebrewn fungi and the myriad ways they could murder you, tho.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2020 23:19

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Meinberg posted:

The thing is, if you ignore the War of Souls novels, the actual SAGA Dragonlance game is actually pretty decent. It�s a lot more lightweight than D&D, but the system is also a lot more elegant than 2e. Moreso, the setting as presented in SAGA is an interesting one. The gods are gone, so it makes sense that its up to mortals to get poo poo done. The dragon overlords might just be MORE DRAGON but they leave a palpable impact on the setting and make for some great final bosses.

Basically, as long as you ignore the metaplot, SAGA isn�t bad.

Yeah, the card system is... an early attempt at doing a story-focused system and it's functional enough. It's still pretty rough just because of its era, and the whole card usage is pretty clunky for character creation, but it works fairly well as a light game in play.

Granted, the cards' visual design makes my my eyes want to crawl into my skull, but you can't have everything.

Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jan 29, 2020

# ¿ Jan 29, 2020 04:28

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

mllaneza posted:

Someone should unfuck the DL series and run it as a Fellowship campaign.

If you can unfuck it, you can probably do better on your own.

Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Jan 31, 2020

# ¿ Jan 31, 2020 13:21

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

It's a conceit to potentially drive non-consensual sex into a game. It's not a deep moral dilemma. It may as well just be a dick-shaped keyhole.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 22:58

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Nea posted:

the difference between this and Piss Christ is that piss christ is a fascinating and valuable piece of art

Pretty much. Whether or not that was true of Piss Christ at its inception, people's reaction and its resulting fame made it into one.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2020 19:23

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Omnicrom posted:

The thing that still sticks in my craw is the opening narration text. It is ASTOUNDINGLY disgusting and hypocritical that the book should go tut-tut at people for being gross and porny when the book ITSELF is someone's fetish writ large about being gross and porny.

How much of the edgelord corner of the OSR is this, anyway? A lot, I'd bet.

RPGs in general (particularly Monster Manuals) have a thing for sex-shaming through their antagonists, whether it's succubi or just baddies dressed up in BDSM themed-gear (looking at you, Black Spiral Dancer... Mooks?), so it's nothing new, but it reaches a fever pitch in stuff like this.

Who's the artist, anyway? They deserve better work.

Wapole Languray posted:

Do people want me to continue this? Stop here? Or just give a super annotated cliff's note version of the rest?

Had I peeked in earlier I might have suggested using more in the way of spoiler tags, particularly for the larger table images, but that ship has already sailed for the most part.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2020 02:47

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Siembieda has, in a rare bit of self-awareness, admitted in the they're not really suited to tackle the Middle East, so it's been avoided.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2021 15:52

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Mail service and communication are baffling mysteries in the Rifts setting. Erin Tarn routinely sends mail through unknown means. Early books said that long-distance radio is nixed by all the ambient PPE, but that's frequently forgotten later. (Satellites are explicitly no longer usable, which remains consistent.) Carella got around that by having messenger drones be a thing, but that was forgotten afterwards.

Technically T-10 armor is radiation-shielded, but if that was a big enough nuke to annihilate Kittani power armor (a single tacnuke wouldn't be enough), it fits that it wouldn't be enough shielding.

Everything about the Makti is whole cloth, I believe, and not based on anything from the game. Too bad their psychic powers don't seem to include psychic purification.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2021 19:45

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

SirPhoebos posted:

Of course since this is Palladium, even this sensible policy has had dumb repercussions in their products. Ninjas & Supersies includes the martial art Ch'a Ch'uan, which was developed by ethnic-Chinese Muslims. But in order to avoid discussing Islam, according to N&S Ch'a Ch'uan is a Mongolian style (despite not having a Mongolian name) practiced by nomadic goat-herders who do jump-kicks from horseback.

Erick Wujcik was trusted by Siembieda as a source on Asian history and culture, so I'd presume he had much more of a blank check for that sort of thing. This trust was often misplaced. Ninjas & Superspies at least admits some of its martial arts information is fictional, but given its absolutely cringe depictions of Asian people, it's not worth being too generous about it.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2021 19:50

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

The author's doing a lot from whole cloth with the cultural and psychic stuff, but considering Rifts World Book 4: Africa, that's largely a blessing so far.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 16:41

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

You could definitely pick elements out of Degenesis to carry over to your own post-apoc game, but it's a situation where the context of some things - in addition to the outright bad poo poo - actively makes the whole worse.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2021 00:13

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

I'm just going to say this feels less like a dungeon and more a like a wish list of abusive art installations.

Of course, the specific focus on philistinist traps speaks to how the author sees the world; subtext is for cowards.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2021 05:23

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Ratoslov posted:

Also the quantity of 'here is a person in need of help; if you help them they will backstab you immediately' traps.

Add in "women who manipulate you with beauty" and a particular viewpoint becomes clear.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2021 16:04

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

The Cosmic Cube turns out to be intelligent and becomes a character all it's own in the Earth-616 continuity (as opposed to Earth-51914, the alternate universe that Hostess ads take place in).

# ¿ Aug 30, 2021 16:09

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Finally, Degenesis is over, and Regenesis can begin.

I'm sorry you had to go through all that.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2021 07:12

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

JcDent posted:

While I'd point to your RIFTS FnFs as an inspiration, I clearly didn't learn any of your conciseness that allowed you to shovel that much turd that fast

Hahahaha concise he says-

Anyway I feel like my concise style I did later came a little too late, but I tried. It's nothing like what I did for Riffs on my Patreon, though, where I got to "say what I want to say about a book in ~2 pages."

Halloween Jack posted:

whups i dealt marijuana for a month and now i feel nothing but hunger, fury, and sass

forgot the -1 for failing to tell kids to stay in school

# ¿ Sep 6, 2021 20:51

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

PurpleXVI posted:

Actually... wouldn't that count as "close interactions" with humans? I feel like you'd come out on a net 0, there.

I guess you'd have to ask your City Planner.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2021 23:03

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

When he eats all the assassin souls, is that a way to explain why there aren't assassins in 2e? Or do they live on, just soulless? What about Artemis Entreri, Drizzt's somehow more boring assassin rival?

Who's that on the cover? Is it the the sleepiest Zhentarim?

# ¿ Sep 8, 2021 17:30

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Pour one out for any assassin PC that bumbles into this adventure. Well, and actually makes it that far.

Yes, 2e didn't have assassins, but the line between editions wasn't so stark in actual play.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2021 18:25

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

potatocubed posted:

In this post you describe five locations where both men and women are present. In all five, if the location is infected with spideryness it's a woman who is showing the effects.

With the focus on weird pregnancies and miss mouth STD, though everybody seems to be awful, it definitely seems to have that cis-male sexfear common to the edgier end of the OSR.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2021 17:38

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Let's not have amnesia about how abysmally dull Anne Rice was.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2021 04:38

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Mork Borg I picked up as a layout reference first and as a game second. It's a fine game, it has neat ideas, the writing is strong in its sparsity, but it's chiefly a great example of all the things you can do with layout. (Not that you should do all the things it does, but as a reference for ideas, it's really strong.)

# ¿ Nov 4, 2021 01:40

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

JcDent posted:

drat, that is some game.

Ok, why were the early d20s just double d10s? It sounds absurd, but there's probably some obscure rationale for it, like with them being used in a card game you can't legally play unless you're a spinster or a parson.

Early d10s were what we would call d20s, with 0-9 numbered twice. Even though they were 20-sided, it would be some time before people started actually marking all 20 sides for a 1-20, so most early icosahedrons were actually 0-9. The modern d10 hadn't been invented yet, and 0-9 had appeal for wargamers to being used for mechanics that could be derived from real military statistics.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2022 20:34

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Hostile V posted:

Then they’re buzzed by a one-man helicopter flown by a Primer that Patriot recognized because he helped train him: Eddie “Charge” Hamilton, a Charger Delta which means he can shoot electricity from his hands and also has some defensive abilities. This helicopter is poorly defined; my mind just envisions it as a backpack with a rotor and mounted guns even though it’s actually just a helicopter with miniguns which Eddie is using to shoot at them, and Patriot basically just shoots it in the fuel tank and it explodes.

You don't have to imagine, we have the tape:

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

# ¿ May 6, 2022 16:55

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Yes.

# ¿ May 6, 2022 17:46

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 05:08

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

potatocubed posted:

"Have you ever considered what it might be like to not be an indestructible killing machine who hates everything that lives?"

*slides copy of Golden Sky Stories across the irradiated floor*

One sec, going to recommend roaches to Ewen for GSS.

# ¿ May 14, 2022 21:05

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