Trad Games Chat: squabbled over drafts, forked, and disbanded

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Trad Games Chat: squabbled over drafts, forked, and disbanded

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Joe Slowboat posted:

I have played a character who was just "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" - that was her entire starting concept. I intend to do so again, because that game fell through.
BOC are great, and they're the single most TTRPG-inspiration band I can think of.

I still want to drop into some kind of mid to high power superhero game with Imaginos, but I think Imaginos might be a bad guy, so it's kind of tricky.

As for what I'm playing or running right now, I'm running nothing, but I'm in a Sunday game with similar people that alternates between a reskinned DND5 game loosely paralleling the events of the first Final Fantasy game and a Scion 2E game set in Los Angeles.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2021 23:16

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 07:55

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Snooze Cruise posted:

drat, when is the crossover, lets get Lina Inverse into space

Belters Step Past Out Of Clear Revulsion

# ¿ Jan 22, 2021 01:34

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Coolness Averted posted:

Or just go with "yeah it was set up to be highly resistant to disruption, and now still exists just because no one is gonna waste the resources to destroy the satellites, or find every broadcast tower and dismantle its super battery. Better to just ignore the old network, anything attached to it has long since fallen apart"

I certainly can't think of any uses for an eternal nuclear battery in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. Pretty single-use technology right there, honestly.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2021 06:49

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LatwPIAT posted:

The decade-long period of rationing during and immediately after WWII killed British cuisine. Not only did the "institutional" knowledge of how to make certain things disappear with a near-decade of disuse, but entire cheese cultures died out completely and permanently because nobody could make that kind of cheese during rationing.

Pretty much. These were the conditions at the dawn of ubiquitous recorded media though, so now it will be burned into people's brains forever! :v:

BinaryDoubts posted:

I don't think it's intentionally obfuscated, Moran is a very clear writer. That said, the concepts and organization are very unusual so it's hard to grok unless you happen to operate at her wavelength.

I'm close enough to it that Chuubo's made sense to me - if anything it was de-mystifying - but Sidereals I had to kind of extrapolate out from the other Exalted materials until I went 'oh, okay, that's the idea, strong powers but locked into somewhat arbitrary symbologies.'

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 23:54

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hyphz posted:

Also don't forget that "put up and shut up" is more of a cultural value in the UK, whether it is appropriate or not.

Put up AND shut up? Can you explain this one? Over here it's "put up or shut up," and it's usually in the context of "back up your talk or stop with the talk," i.e. if you can actually flip your truck and come out of it fine like you've said a hundred times, fuckin do it where we can see or stop bragging about it.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2021 01:00

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Yawgmoth posted:

I don't think this actually exists, to be perfectly honest. I don't have a huge number of experiences with either side of that kind of transaction, but of those that I have had, the DMs looking to get paid to run a game were either "absolutely every single interaction in my life must be monetized" or "mom told me I have to get a job to keep living in the basement so this is it" types. I don't think either is really conducive to a good game.

Paying the GM seems rather ridiculous, although I suppose the folk tradition of "the DM is not asked to pony up for the pizza order" could be interpreted as payment.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2021 03:45

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aldantefax posted:

I have contemplated a tabletop RPGs music thread. I think considering entire genres and countless hours and bands have been dedicated to recanting their elfgames I'm surprised there isn't actually one yet.

I would propose this thread but with a slightly different mission: It is intended for sharing or requesting soundtracks with a certain mood or theme, as well as sharing stuff like Hyddyn Sceptrye's tale of the wizards and the elves with the witches.

You would also need ground rules of some kind... I think youtube links or Spotify-compatible artist/track listings would be good for general stuff, as well as other sites such as Bandcamp and so on. At some point this may be bordering into :files: but I am not sure where the border would be...

# ¿ Feb 1, 2021 11:42

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Leraika posted:

Each turn's roll is a string of actions - so a 1 would be move -> special ability a -> whatever next if there was a third tile in the pattern, to be clear. Sorry I'm explaining this poorly, but I'm trying to do so without actually copying and pasting whole sheets or anything.

So each roll starts from the center and works its way out, eh? And I imagine if the basic attack and special move A are not ranged attacks, then the monster's turn ends there as it moves towards its next target.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2021 23:54

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Drone posted:

My questions: Is it a dickish move to explicitly state that I prefer players with a more-than-casual familiarity with the setting when posting a new game on an LFG forum (not necessarily SA)? Is this terrible gatekeeper-ism? Am I part of the problem?

Edit: I mean I guess it also sorta goes along with similar questions like "is it bad if I outline the exact kind of player I'm looking for, instead of being welcoming for anyone to apply"? Like, if I were wanting to run a sandbox Traveller campaign set on a free trader, I would of course be wanting to prioritize players with a higher degree of fondness for trade campaigns and an innate love of Excel. Or if I were wanting to run Apocalypse World, I would prioritize players who constantly ooze narrative and want to be a bit more "serious" about their roleplaying, etc. I just don't know if laying stuff like that out there in the LFG post is dickish, snobby, and gatekeepey, because I can't shake the feeling that it kinda is?

I think if you have a specific reason for it and that reason has a functional purpose, you are probably doing everyone involved a favor. I was in a pickup game at a con that leaned deep into some arcane lore about Doctor Who which was giving a few people there total nerd boners but me and my pal were just kind of like, "ha ha, yes. doctor who. i like the robot dog" -- had that person been up front in their session description that it was kind of a canon nerd thing, neither of us would have signed up, but that would have been a good thing.

It also sounds like you're not aiming for "heh, you better know the lore... scrub," either.

I would quibble briefly with the "constantly ooze narrative" part but that is because that seems very wide open, while the other examples (familiarity with an IP you intend to do deep dives with; being whole-heartedly on board with fighting through a sandbox with spreadsheet and blaster) are more quantifiable play experiences.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 13:14

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If the cards' form factor was kept to be the same as standard playing cards, you could also use automatic shufflers, which seem common and not too expensive (many under $25 after a quick glance at the devil Bezos site).

Of course that doesn't leave you a lot of room for fancy art.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2021 08:38

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mellonbread posted:

Text based RPing definitely lets you inhabit a character better. It also erases issues with voice connectivity, having to repeat things multiple times because people couldn't hear or weren't listening, etc.

The tradeoff is how much longer it takes than just talking. In addition to the amount of time it takes to type up a response, being able to revise before sending means everyone will fiddle with their reply until it's perfect. I started playing RPGs online through text posts in the roll20 chat, and I was amazed at how much faster my first voice game went.
Obviously you hire a band or orchestra to play the music live at the table.

Having played a shitload of text RPGs, the first thing you have to do is sort of realize that you're not going to have perfectly polished writing, and that a once-over'd rough draft for something like a live session, or even just a short bit of character business, is absolutely fine. ("Joyeuse says, "Curses! This goblin vexes me" as firebolt number four goes wide!" etc.)

It's kind of like the pottery class analogy. Quantity, on some level, will build quality.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2021 23:54

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JacquelineDempsey posted:

Quotin' myself here; I asked this over in A/T's Stupid/Small Questions and got referred here.

I'm curious if anyone's DM'ed a totally underwater campaign, and if so, how'd you do it?

I don't know about a fully underwater campaign because if you got to the point where everyone was always underwater it would just, in a sense, be a regular campaign. Other than the breathing, the two largest changes are usually, first, that you have to deal with the fact that you're moving through water, which as you have likely noticed is a little thicker than air; and second, that even if you can breathe, fire is going to not work very well, while electrical attacks will work differently.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2021 23:24

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Everybody moving on a 3D plane in a water scenario is true but would also probably be less of a factor than you might imagine, because the PCs' goal is (presumably) not to hunt the enemy fishmen for food, but rather to reach or otherwise obtain some location. It would certainly be similar to everyone having Flight, of course.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 20:29

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Lemon-Lime posted:

No Room for a Wallflower is still a bad introductory adventure because it immediately breaks one of the things the game has told you is a core setting assumption in an irreversible way. It's a good adventure, and the stuff in it is very cool, but as an adventure meant to introduce people to the game and the setting as described in the core book, it's terrible.

Plot considerations aside, it's definitely worth looking at as a GM because it's putting into practice the structural advice given by the core book and shows you what a Lancer campaign "should" look like.

Now that's the Mage: the Ascension-grade gamefucklery I like to hear about. What did they do with it?

# ¿ Mar 26, 2021 23:36

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Mycroft Holmes posted:

Weird question: Is there a RPG where each player controls a squad instead of a single character?

Scion 2E has rules for having a gang, gaggle, or other military unit under your control, but that's usually in the context of like "Andrea the Dwarf Giant Has a Posse" rather than being about squad cohesion or other emergent details of small group tactics.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2021 01:46

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theironjef posted:

Consistently the hardest problem I have with getting people into a supers game is that something seems to be broken in a lot of my friends regarding their ability to just earnestly make a superhero. You know, costume, powers, codename that references those powers. Can be a little silly, no problem. But every time it's like "Make a regular superhero" "I made an angry broken man with no powers and a terrible disease." "Make a superhero without deconstructing the genre." "I made the ubermensch but he's a terrible goblin it turns out." "Make a guy named [something] lad, where something is the kind of powers he has." I made Gangrene Lad, he died of gangrene some time ago."

Maybe they're just loving with me, who knows.

I've run into this sort of problem in other contexts. I doubt your players are loving with you, it is more likely that they have mostly engaged with the primary superhero-type media they've encountered in their lives, which has had a lot of grim gunplay and emphasizing of ideas like an angry man on the edge doing murders (but they're OK) or Watchmen or so forth. Those are the mainstream now.

The Marvel films play it surprisingly straight on this front.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 04:43

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In addition to the various examples, the X-Men were explicitly a team book and were phenomenally successful. There was a point where Spider-Man's tag line was "the NON MUTANT super hero!"

Now you would probably be well served to have some kind of through-line for all of your characters if you have an adventuring party kind of situation. But it also strikes me that superhero RPGs would be a great way for troupe style play, where there's a couple of different characters each PC has and they can come together for different situations.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 06:45

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Ghost Leviathan posted:

I feel like a superhero RPG may end up indistinguishable from Nextwave.

As intended in the good Lord's plan.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 11:03

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Mechanically speaking, probably pretty well. Indeed I remember while reading the F&F review of Godlike that if you made it somewhat harder to be (REALISTICALLY!) gibbed by random German artillery or randomly pro-German backstory, you didn't need to change anything about the powers beyond giving them music names and a little gloss.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 18:55

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Halloween Jack posted:

When I was F&Fing Godlike, everyone kept talking about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, but if this forum is any indication JJBA is more well known and discussed than Shakespeare or the Bible

It was mostly the specificity of a lot of the powers. You don't have "shadow control," you have "control over your shadow even if it has been projected by a searchlight to be a mile tall."

However you are probably right about the other point.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 20:31

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Xinder posted:

All the other threads feel too specific so I'll just ask here in the chat thread:

Looking for a game to buy my wife for her birthday (which is in September so I have plenty of time). She specifically asked for a complicated game involving cards. I know how much she loves really complex games like Gloomhaven, so simplicity is actually a point against her enjoyment. She seems really intent on it being mostly a card game and that leaves me kinda lost. I was looking at Arkham Horror, but I don't know about the whole LCG thing. It feels like it might be a consistent money sink instead of a game you buy and play for months on end before needing an expansion or anything like that. Maybe Gloomhaven spoiled me in that regard. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding how LCGs work?

Any advice on this front? Sorting by weight on boardgamegeek just gets me games that only have one review so it hasn't been the most helpful.

You might try Yomi, although that doesn't have very long individual games.

Do you have any examples of card games she's specifically enjoyed in the past?

# ¿ Apr 8, 2021 08:22

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Leperflesh posted:

I do not intend this post to be judgmental of any of you who do enjoy any of the above. Do you guys feel there's a way to roleplay an evil character who does bad things, in a realism-feeling game, but still be a healthy leisure-time activity? How do you feel about it afterward?

It depends on how you define "evil."

Is "evil" acting selfishly? Violently? Against the will of prevailing religious and social mores? In a way that is harmful to others but beneficial to you (as distinct from 'selfish' which leaves ample space for simply ignoring downsides)? I would have a hard time saying any of these four things are objectively evil - the fourth might come closest but which could also represent you having needs or harms which require restorative action of some kind, which is harmful to others, or potentially some sort of zero-sum situation.

I personally find it unsatisfying to have people be pure-E Evil in realistic situations. This does not mean they would not do evil things, but that they would do them for reasons that make sense to them, either rationally or emotionally. The aphorism that people don't think of themselves as evil seems to ring false for me, at least in recent times, but people do rarely do things just for the sheer joy of wickedness.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 09:47

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I think a lot of this depends on what the player wants to do. The Master Blaster set-up you describe presents the wrinkle that the halfling is implicitly committed to being in the same space, or at the least adjacent to, the goliath.

I would agree that roleplaying it is probably the best solution.

Coolness Averted posted:

I think the best way to handle something like that is always just going to be narrative stuff abd not mechanics. That also means as GM not putting them in positions where you say "erm no I've decided based on your fluff younauto fail or have worse rolls"

Yeah, if you wanted some kind of strict mechanical reflection, something like "Halfling's move rate gradually reduces" is pretty much what you've got to look at here. You could perhaps add some compensatory benefit like necrotic resistance or something, I suppose, since this is meant to represent a curse. This would be a potentially significant advantage if you are going against the undead at length.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 05:58

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Tsilkani posted:

I'm pretty sure every alien superhero is required by law to have at least one Earth food they are unreasonably obsessed with, so you're doing good work.

# ¿ May 5, 2021 02:58

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CitizenKeen posted:

Is there a campaign pitch for a tactical game any of you wish existed? I'm cobbling together a tactical system that I think has some potential, but for the first time in my life, I'm completely blanking on cool settings. I've been fleshing it out with bog standard fantasy, but that's boring. Should be a good setting for lots of grid combat, and have room for some fantastical abilities.

Early Modern/simple firearms situations a la Warhammer Fantasy/Warmachine-sans-warjacks. Possible alternate location or flavoring: drawing on Nobunaga-era Japan, including the power of yari ashigaru or their equivalent.

Something like Monster Hunter: Unique but learnable large monsters with the battle being endurance/maneuver rather than just dropping the hammer. Good if you want to include lots of movement.

Plains warfare with an emphasis on horse/cavalry/etc. mobility. (This one may be more awkward for grid work but you might be able to get a good idea out of this.)

SCP/Men in Black situation where the tactical units are various agents working to suppress or control Incidents.

# ¿ May 11, 2021 20:15

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Charlz Guybon posted:

Why not just have a stone age hunter gatherer society living in a world with dinosaurs? Have some background myths that make it clear to the player, but not the characters, that their ancestors were abducted by aliens and brought to this world and leave it a that. No interactions with aliens, space explorers from Earth, etc. Just stone age folk dealing with dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts on this zoo planet.

So is the idea that the humans fight the dinosaurs or that there's a Dinotopia situation going on here, if potentially one where the dinosaurs are not intelligent? Can human and their natural enemy, dinosaur, unite forces in the face of -- something?

# ¿ May 14, 2021 05:55

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Asterite34 posted:

An idea to synergise two thread conversation topics at once: Dying Earth genre dinosaur game, set in the Last Days of the Cretaceous

If you want to add some relevent scifi weirdness, have two competing factions of time travellers, future humans and David Icke esque Reptilians from mutually exclusive futures, in a struggle to determine whether reptiles or mammals come out on top of the coming mass extinction

Make them birds and now you're cooking with gas. For bonus points, Human and Yehat must join forces in the face of the true enemy: the Trilobite.

# ¿ May 14, 2021 07:02

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Tulip posted:

Why is Lovecraft the author who gets to be the voice of his generation? Why him over Langston Hughes or John Steinbeck or Agatha Christie or Zora Neale Hurston, who were all more popular at the time?

I think all of these listed folks would be much higher in consideration as a voice of the 1920s and 1930s, although I could see Lovecraft or Howard making it onto a Top 20 list towards the bottom.

They do have the factor of indirect influence, which is harder to gauge. For instance, Lovecraft was a big influence on Stephen King, who it seems hard to say is not an important American writer of, at least, the 1980s. But how much of that is the old racist and how much is King (who has his own problems but is, uh, not in the same league as either of the '20s guys)?

whydirt posted:

Maybe a useful exercise would be to recommend authors who similar to Howard and Lovecraft but are less racist or are even minorities themselves?

I used to recommend Alexis Kennedy for this purpose, but heyo! Sex pest!

# ¿ May 22, 2021 01:06

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Antivehicular posted:

I also assume that a lot of those meatgrinder OSR modules are written primarily for reading and maybe for scavenging a few bits, with usability at the table a distant secondary goal. A Wizard is very clever, and I found it fun to read, but it doesn't seem like it'd be remotely fun to actually play.

I think most of them were convention modules - either derived from something Gygax or someone ran at Gencon, or possibly prepared in the interest of farming it out to DMs so you'd get massive parallelism.

# ¿ May 25, 2021 03:35

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Ettin posted:

One thing I noticed while writing HWI was that a lot of people have a very specific idea of what a cyberpunk game is�the PCs are cyborg mercs in a dystopia full of gonzo sci-fi tech who hang out in dive bars when they're not working for corporations or gunning down mostly-Asian gangsters�and will assume all cyberpunk games are like that. Hard Wired Island has some combat-scenario options (e.g. the Dreamer stuff) but if it turns out your group treats it as Shadowrun Again and you figure out why I'd be interested to know in the HWI thread

I think for a lot of people, Shadowrun basically informed their fundamental understanding of 'the genre, at least in tabletop, and probably in general' and it is genuinely a shame because it's like we get to deal with D&D's bullshit all over again!

# ¿ May 27, 2021 10:30

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Scion 2E's social, crafting/wondermaking and investigatory mechanics are perhaps less beefy than the combat system but they're comparable. I'm not sure what Scion 1E had; probably a picture of a dog.

# ¿ May 30, 2021 06:23

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Asterite34 posted:

This feels like the issue, we're barking up the wrong tree trying to replace highly gamefied combat with highly gameified social interaction. It's a clich� that D&D players are socially awkward, but even the most catpiss of neckbeards is probably better at socializing than they are swinging a sword or throwing a fireball.

The trick here is to find something that, like combat, is a highly complex thing with lots of dynamic interactions and customization and flourish that is esoteric enough as an IRL skill that it requires special rules to model in an interesting way.

Phoenix Wright style legal action. Your archetypes are Investigator, Attorney, Wacky Sidekick and Sorceror - pick any two!

e: Your problem with this is that you do ultimately have one guy who is Phoenix Wright and everyone else is not, and that would be a lot more stark than the fighter/wizard divide, even if being able to shout :objection:

in real life would probably be a lot of fun.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 19:39

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Tulip posted:

I think that last part is resolvable - it's fairly common to have a game that starts with one major touchstone as its kind of obvious media piece and a second one that is a fairly clear example of where it gets its classes from. Apocalypse World is Mad Max for sure, but the classes are much more Firefly than Mad Max. Blades in the Dark is very Thief & Dishonored as its main media, but the classes feel a lot more like Leverage than how Thief & Dishonored do it.

So Phoenix Wright, but also by way of CSI or something. Something with a good ensemble feel to it.

True. In the actual 'trial phase' you could have the individual people present their portions of the case and use their own rolls, while the attorney class's job would be to play goalie for shots at the weak spots you have (and to shout HOLD IT) at key components.

I'm imagining that your adventures would kind of rack up Evidence value but also possibly some kind of case flaw tracker, with the challenge being that you have to run up Evidence while keeping case flaw as low as it can be.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 21:05

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Leperflesh posted:

I had an idea for a game a few years ago about being a fantasy-setting circuit court. 1+ players, so in one-player mode you're literally just a judge doing a circuit, add more players and you can have like a baliff, maybe investigators, defense counsel, etc. Part of the game would be the players inventing the legal system that they're nominally implementing (or failing to), so each adventure or campaign could have radically different feel depending on what laws you're putting people on trial for breaking, whether you run fair or unfair trials, what sorts of punishments you can or do implement, etc.

It needn't necessarily be a high-magic or low-magic fantasy setting, either, could work in SF too; the important part is, you travel around and visit communities that have the need for, but cannot self-provide, court services, as with the original meaning of a "circuit" court.

Then I realized last year, oh, this is basically about being cops, and didn't really want to make that game any more; even with the best of intentions, it would likely attract people who just wanted to use the game to roleplay their fascist fantasies, ugh.

Circuit judges and such well predate the modern system of policing that we know, although it does presuppose a certain degree of what you would probably call 'law enforcement'. On the other hand I imagine that if the game is set up as such that you 'win' by instituting justice and that adventures involve investigating or resolving crimes, with violence being maybe an occasional thing where some guy's last-ditch effort is to pull out his deLameter or lure you into a death trap... different story.

Tulip posted:

And now I'm bouncing the idea of a "bad lawyers" game where you intimidate witnesses and bribe jurors...

What I'm imagining here is that you have kind of two things you're trying to develop with your case: 'Power,' which is just "how good is your legal case," and 'flaws,' which represent weak points that the other side can use to gently caress you up. If you have sufficient 'Power' then maybe flaws don't matter - or maybe you're in a situation where it's OK if you don't have a lot of power, but you absolutely cannot have a single flaw.

Sort of like victory points in a board game. And of course some cases might require an absurd number of victory points AND to dig down into the opponents' flaws to have a chance, but that's why Phoenix Wright made it into Marvel vs. Capcom.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 23:35

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Leperflesh posted:

I was thinking that your characters might gain in prestige or resources or experience or whatever by concluding cases, without the game deciding that you needed to 'win' or 'lose' them, particularly given the party might be on both sides of any case, and might not have any way to know whether a given suspect was "actually" innocent or guilty. They might need to deal with repercussions and complications either way, too; a community might be hostile to the circuit court, or to a suspect(s), or deeply split; you'd answer to some sort of regional authority that might evaluate your performance based on a variety of criteria (cost, whether the nobility is satisfied, adherence to holy scripture, execution quota, etc.). Perhaps a lot of that could be determinable by the party as part of pre-adventure/campaign generation or during the adventure too, I dunno.

There's problems. You can't assume anyone playing the game is familiar with lawyering or judging or historical examples of either, which is an authoring problem (how much of a game's pages can you devote to teaching people skills and history?). As a game, people might find themselves really uncomfortable with passing judgement on someone when they're not really sure of their guilt but have in-game pressure to reach a verdict, even if you're not officially "cops" you're still part of a law enforcement structure, etc. etc.

I dunno. I'll probably mull it for another several years while doing nothing with it, as is my wont.

I think there's a few different possibilities in this space here.

One would be, at the risk of using a Less Than Friendly Analogy, something like that you're the assistants to an Inquisitorial figure or one of the PCs has the power to make the final judgment call and you are, more or less, the law; you find the facts with the team but you will ultimately be called upon to make a judgment, and carry out the relevant sentence (which, to be fair, will far more often be 'give him 3 cows' or 'the house belongs to X, not Y' than 'DEATH'). This probably works best in something resembling a classical fantasy milieu.

In something more closely resembling your modern day court system, you would have either a prosecutor or a defense attorney. Defense attorneys seem like they would be more easily cast in a heroic mold, a la Phoenix Wright, and it could well be an ironclad rule that when the campaign begins, the GM has to make a fundamental statement - no subversions - of, "Everyone you defend is innocent," "everyone you defend is innocent of the crime of which they are accused," or "everyone deserves a strong legal defense, even if they loving well did it."

Those all have different moods, but so do different styles of D&D campaigns. Legendary heroes vs. murderhoboes vs. some hypothetical-but-rarely-done 'military campaign play' or something. The issues seem comparable, with the benefit that you could very well have a campaign with a dozen cases and make strong impacts without killing a single person, even in a medieval environment.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2021 04:40

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Kestral posted:

Does anyone have a link to that story - I think it might have been an imgur album? - about how infamously hard it is to get fantasy artists to draw the thing you've commissioned from them, and how they instead keep wanting to draw whatever titillates them? The one where it contrasts something to the effect of, the commission description of a female ranger in functional wilderness attire, and the actual art being basically softcore porn?

I heard this story about Exalted artists. Some of the artists they hired would give them what they wanted, more or less, with, yes, some of their personal tastes intruding, but like that dude who really wanted to draw panda people drew so many they were just like "Ok fine, the panda people are canon, this is easier than arguing with him."

# ¿ Jun 20, 2021 07:11

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LatwPIAT posted:

Her name is Sophie Campbell, but yes.

My bad! I think she did the signature Abyssal caste illustrations in 2E, so it wasn't like an inability to draw other things (some people have weirdly specific drawing limits).

# ¿ Jun 20, 2021 09:46

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Coolness Averted posted:

Exalted was literally discussed this page. Though tbf folks were talking about 2nd e. I don't know if 3rd is anywhere near as bad.
Pathfinder is still a thing and Amiri the signature barbarian was still wearing "armor everywhere but her torso" at least as of the 2018 videogame. In terms of general cultural zeitgeist Red Sonja is still a thing and to my knowledge still running around in just a bikini.
It's not anywhere as bad as it used to be where everything was pure horny, but it's also silly to pretend there isn't a ton of weird sex stuff in nerd poo poo these days. The ads for printable minis I get on fb also makes it look like the trend is still big too.

Exalted 1E had some memorable and distinctive art, even if you can argue with the quality or elements of it. It certainly wasn't generic. I think a lot of it was B&W.

2E mostly followed along with this, if with somewhat more explicit 'anime/manga style' takes on things, including short comics. There was more color, including as I recall some oddities like colorful renders of various pieces of setting-appropriate equipment -- which is probably at least a little defensible, just because Exalted drew from a lot of sources.

3E seems to be in this modern trend of "Let's get something in gorgeous full color, and what matters is that it's full color, not that the composition or flow are worth much. It just needs to kinda look like a painting." This includes stuff like the famous image in which Chejop Kejak, ancient mystic conspirator and kung-fu man, was looking at a range of floating screen-like objects, one of which had -- was it Age of Empires 3? Some video game's login screen.

If I had my own druthers, purely from aesthetic, I would have stuck with 1E's take. I'm not sure why they abandoned B&W art... does it come off as cheap, do the people who pay through the nose for Kickstarters want specifically that?

# ¿ Jun 21, 2021 21:43

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

They are a bit "Monster Hunter without Monster Hunter, plus some rejected FFX-2 designs"

# ¿ Jun 21, 2021 22:16

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 07:55

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

tokenbrownguy posted:

Good is a very relative term when it comes to Godlike.

Does it accurately simulate nazis getting shot in the head with super powers? Yes.

Do PCs get shot in the head by lucky super powered nazis on a regular basis? Also yes.

Does the game make you even more depressed by asking the question, �what if ww2 had superpowers?� with �alcoholism, massacres, and hopelessness�? Also yes.

One of my larger takeaways from the Fatal and Friends on it was that they looked at the historiography of World War II, asked thoughtfully "Now who would do horrible death-camp experimentation on super people to the point of causing breakouts, riots, and bizarre poo poo haunting the back roads of the theater of war?" and came to the conclusion of "Why, the Soviets, of course!"

# ¿ Jun 23, 2021 06:45

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Trad Games Chat: squabbled over drafts, forked, and disbanded

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