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a lot of pathfinder 1e was designed by Dungeons and Dragons 3.5e superfans, for whom character creation was a game in and of itself and one that it was important people be able to lose. as a result, there are ~eight thousand classes in this game, and a list of ~eight million feats, 95% of which will be completely useless to a given character concept. this allows you to replicate the thrilling D+D 3.5 experience of reading through a dozen sourcebooks trying to find the feat/class combination that will allow you to break the game in half, as opposed to being a useless accessory while the wizard ends the encounter. the Wrath guys have followed this up with Rogue Trader, which is based on a much, much simpler system. in that, they have only made one character class useless, and only about half the feats are useless. so they have learned from their mistakes!
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2024 16:48 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 06:52 |
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Hello silver dragon, lordly protector of the city Goodbye, silver dragon, lordly protector of the city
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# ¿ Feb 16, 2024 01:53 |
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Lann and Wendaug are interesting artifacts of iterative game design the writers went back later and gave both of them significantly better characters than their original "i am the good one" "i am the bad one." unfortunately by that point the game had already been scripted out quite a ways, and so the player's experience of them is an interesting character who is replaced by a cardboard cut-out for the purposes of set pieces. Camelia's a one-trick pony, but I'll give the writers credit for trying to figure out an answer for "how does an evil person operate in a fantasy society anyway"
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2024 23:45 |
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Cythereal posted:There's a lot of oddities where people stick around in mythic paths you wouldn't think they would. well, yeah, she's from Crusader City, her whole life has been based on the observation that if you say the right words before going on a killing spree those types will sign off on it
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# ¿ Feb 18, 2024 14:53 |
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Cythereal posted:I'd call it 80% demons, 10% undead, 10% everything else. Wrath is, uh, not subtle about what you'll spend most of the game fighting. its one of the weirder expressions of the age-old nerd curse of overdetailing. the idea of having trained your character to be The Best at the thing they do, and oh hey, that time has come and now it's my time to shine, is extremely cool. providing mechanical support to that idea, also, is cool, and part of the fun for character optimizers. unfortunately after you've spent a few years establishing all the different fiddly little ways to do that, you have given your players a massive tome of homework they have to do, produced a rat's nest of unintended interactions between all the fiddly little ways to do that, and also made your own job of balancing out encounters an insane nightmare. something that will make the optimized character work for it is going to annihilate Billy the Human Fighter as he walks into the room, and something that will make Billy the Human Fighter feel like he's contributing will fall over if the optimized character looks in its general direction. and then when you take the optimized character out of the situation they're optimized for, the problem reverses itself. in conclusion gaming is a land of contrasts
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# ¿ Feb 20, 2024 02:42 |
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Lord Koth posted:The real issue with the Wenduag reveal at the end is that she's painted in such a bad light that practically no one should reasonably pick her over Lann. Supporters can go on and on about how she's a more interesting character overall or they don't like Lann's (eventual) personality or whatever, but right here, right now in making this choice someone would have to pick the person who admitted to all that and just tried to shoot your face in over someone who's been fairly reasonable and loyal up to this point - or, if you picked her over Lann initially, casually switches sides at the drop of a hat and very much admits she'll do it again if such circumstances arise. You can try and meta justify it all you want, but actually trying to RP justify it for almost anyone other than the "for the shits and giggles" kind of person is an enormous stretch. patient zero of 'they wrote this sequence back when Lann was The Good One and Wendaug was The Evil One' look dammit they put this whole intricate cutscene and reveal together, they are not rewriting it around a concerningly order-obsessed wannabe hero and a survival of the fittest enthusiast, just assume they've been taken over by early bioware characters for this bit
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# ¿ Feb 22, 2024 06:02 |
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CommissarMega posted:Speaking as a Wenduag fan myself, I kind of disagree with this. Owlcat did a lot of rewrites between the beta and the final product, they could have redone this scene as well. I think they realized most people were going to side with the hot monstergirl over the guy on the cover of a forbidden love romance novel, and this was going to be their way of encouraging people to take Lann. Yeah, Wenduag was pretty open about being a "I AM IN CONDITION YELLOW" survival of the fittest character from the outset, but considering how many people were willing and able to overlook Camellia, it's hard not to think that some anvils might need dropping. honestly I come at it from the other side, I like Lann as a character (not dipping into his romance probably helps) and the Lann from before and after this would still be revolted, but also, to his horror, would kind of get it. sometimes you make a couple of sacrifices in the name of future advantage, for the good of the group. he'd still fight her here, but there'd be a lot less "HOW COULD YOU DO SUCH A THING" and a lot more "why would you think this was worth doing?" meanwhile our pal Wendy is just comedically, unapologetically, full-bore I Am The Bad Guy, which I'm assured is not really her deal if you put up with her later
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# ¿ Feb 22, 2024 16:05 |
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Szarrukin posted:Owlcat understanding of "lawful" is basically "fascist". Not going to talk about That One Character yet, but my "favourite" part was one encounter in Kingmaker where "I'm going to kill you because you are greenskin" dialogue option was chaotic evil and "I'm going to kill you because as greenskins you are inherently evil" was lawful good option. Then I found out they are Russian developers. Make of it what you will. that particular problem has kind of been baked into the genre from minute one modern sensibilities interact with Gary Gygax writing glorified Conan fanfiction badly, and it is at its worst any time the question 'why is killing everyone in the dungeon and looting everything they have recognized by the divine as Good Actually' pops up
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# ¿ Feb 26, 2024 14:52 |
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paladins were the first of what would eventually become prestige classes, and were originally written as The Fighter Just Better (but they have these REALLY STRICT RP restrictions you guys so trust me its balanced) due to D+D sacred cows being what they are, you will never see the fighter removed from the game. but in a modern video game design paradigm, you would absolutely start as a fighter and then around level three or something decide whether to go Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, or Barbarian, adding the appropriate extra mechanics as you did so.
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# ¿ Feb 26, 2024 17:55 |
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Gun Jam posted:Apropos of nothing - anyone know which game brought this innovation into RPGs? Tyranny, by Obsidian Entertainment. very interesting magic system, world, and writing coupled to some tragically uninspiring combat and a kind of abrupt sequelbait ending. it is the bronze age. the Legions of Kyros, Overlord, have just finished conquering the last of the free nations of the world. the prologue and character creation are how exactly you, one of Kyros' lawspeakers, helped make it happen, climaxing with you personally being the delivery mechanism for one of Kyros' Edicts, a magical WMD. the story proper begins with the conquered territory rebelling, and two of the dread legions tasked with stamping out the rebellion spending more of their time squabbling with each other than actually fighting the rebels. you are sent by the Overlord with an Edict to help solve this problem. you learn at the moment you speak it that the Overlord's magically-enforced command is "if my flag isn't at the top of the rebel stronghold by the end of the week, everyone in the rebelling territory dies." congratulations, Kyros has just said "get this done or all of you die, and i do not care which one happens." as you may gather from that description, there's a lot of context the game delivers through that little trick. in a fun detail, they have a character demonstrate he's a mind-reader by having him talk to you through them occasionally. Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Feb 26, 2024 |
# ¿ Feb 26, 2024 18:14 |
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Cythereal posted:And Pathfinder is supposed to be a modern DnD setting whose makers said they wanted to fix the problems with DnD. i'm shocked to hear that the Pathfinder devs uncritically reproduced all the major problems with DnD while claiming they were setting out to fix them there are One Hundred And Sixty One possible player classes in Wrath of the Righteous btw
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2024 18:05 |
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to give the faintest of all possible praise to that take on the drow, it is while incredibly lovely slightly more dignified than the origins of D+D drow, which was Ed Greenwood hearing that norse mythology held there were light elves and dark elves, and then deciding that since D+D already had 'light' elves straight out of Tolkien, the dark elves would 1. live underground like the Norse ones 2. have a civilization composed entirely of Ed Greenwood's femdom BDSM fantasies, plus spiders for some reason. people who have played Baldur's Gate 3 may be familiar with a character who pops up in it named Elminster. he was Ed Greenwood's self-insert, and the canon list of Forgotten Realms rulers and goddesses he has had sex with goes past funny and well into the realm of depressing. i like the God of War: Ragnarok take on dark elves, though. the dark elves are small, bearded, live underground, and forge weapons. in other words: they're just dwarves. why the gently caress did you think we were two different types of thing, you weirdos
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2024 21:18 |
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Cythereal posted:
constellations are a type of goatee. i will not explain
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# ¿ Mar 1, 2024 00:11 |
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Daeran is "the urge to party as the world burns around you" dot character, and they do a good job with establishing that no, really, no matter the tragic backstory that produced that it's still a lovely thing to be. Nenio feels like a refugee from another, significantly more Joss Whedon-y game. they can't all be hits I suppose.
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 18:28 |
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ProfessorCirno posted:I mean, you absolutely can play off your lich as someone who is tempted into dark powers for a greater good, believing they're doing this for the aforementioned reasons of using the dead to serve against a greater evil. It's a legitimate path in the game. well at that point all you have to do is take up the issue with the arbiters of good and demonstrate their faulty reasoning. admittedly this -will- involve storming the gates of their so-called heavens and laying waste to the blinkered fools who are so eager to die on their behalf, but once that preamble is dealt with the rest is just a matter of reasoned debate and several million heavily armed skeletons.
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# ¿ Mar 18, 2024 20:27 |
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D+D has always had a hard time making the Lawful Evil/Chaotic Evil split work. as pretty ably demonstrated by this game, which tries to tackle the issue, and slides off like a six year old trying to bring down a professional running back
Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Mar 20, 2024 |
# ¿ Mar 20, 2024 01:05 |
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the Aeon is aware you all have some deeply felt reasons for what you are doing, in the same way that small children attacking one another about Pokemon cards probably have deeply felt reasons, and one side might even be in the 'right.' it also does not care. get back to class already.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2024 16:50 |
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Slaan posted:I liked Galfrey until, you know Sosiel is not a bad character, but he's just kind of there. yep, priest of a good god struggling with bad things happening to good people. while it's nice to have him onboard he does not exactly bring a lot to the table, particularly given Daeran and Ember have his casting niche covered and Seelah has his "be a generic voice of Good Alignment" niche covered. if you're chomping at the bit to get rid of Daeran he'll cover you as far as a dedicated healer goes, I guess?
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 03:59 |
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Not having played the game I had no position in the question of whether Nenio is a likeable character or insufferable. Now I do. What an incredibly obnoxious person she's written as. manic pixie dream wizard
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# ¿ Mar 30, 2024 17:53 |
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idonotlikepeas posted:I think this is why I ended up liking her. I tend to do a bunch of romance paths at once in games, at least for anyone I like or think I might like, until the story stops me. (I played Azata, so it was never going to work out.) So I saw a good bit of Galfrey and had at least some understanding of what she was thinking and feeling. I can only imagine how much more upsetting it would be to have her just kramer in out of nowhere and knock down all the pins without the game really giving you a sense of her character first. there is an interesting angle on these in the tabletop game Exalted, which I will go to bat for any time the question "hey wait how do magic powers and the way nation-states work interact" comes up the empire with its boot on the throat of the world is run by the Dragon-Blooded, who pass down their Exaltation by blood. sort of. any given kid of an exalt MIGHT exalt, but there's no guarantees, and the vast majority don't, meaning that most exalts have experienced watching their siblings grow old and die while they still look like they're in the prime of youth. as a direct result, it is around the age of a hundred that Dragon-Blooded of the Realm are considered ready to settle down and become proper adults, because they've worked out most of those pesky mortal attachments that make the young so flighty. sure, by the standards of mortals you verge on unrecognizably insane now. but mortals come and go like the seasons. you're finally ready to start operating on the Real People timescale once you've buried your first batch of kids. (it is assumed that if you are playing a Dragon-Blood, you are playing as one of the younger ones, not least because the old people have accidentally backed themselves into a corner where they're about to tear the entire empire apart in a cataclysmic civil war and the only question is what the sides are going to be.)
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# ¿ Apr 4, 2024 00:09 |
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Capfalcon posted:See, like that's just a dick move. I doubt you're running around disenchanting all your magic items because "Steel shouldn't be that sharp or on fire." of course not. that's on the NEXT timetable.
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# ¿ Apr 4, 2024 04:58 |
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Guildenstern Mother posted:She deserves it for being hundreds of years old and still thinking that hairdo is a good choice. good compromise solution to the problems of "i'm going to have to fight periodically" and also "i'm expected to have long hair for big formal events." also does a good job selling that she's putting a lot of effort into appearing to have everything under control
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# ¿ Apr 4, 2024 19:00 |
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full credit to modern game design giving everyone the experience of awkwardly having to shoot someone down because you're not that interested in them and were just being nice, I suppose the correlated fact that most of a side characters content is unavailable if you aren't interested in loving is annoying, but I get it
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2024 16:27 |
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Cythereal posted:The options are yes, yes and horny, take a rain check, and gently caress off. they did improve on this in Rogue Trader. if you want to start a romance you've got to positively pursue them, and in several cases pursuing too aggressively is going to immediately stop the whole show shout outs to the Subtext Is For Cowards romance with the dedicated aristocrat character, a nightmarishly inbred mutant who can only handle interacting with other people via carefully memorized protocol. she is personally sweet, shy, and painfully sheltered, and has the tongues of her servants removed because one of her books says that's the best way to prevent them from giving her offense. if at any point you stray from the How To Flirt As A 40K Aristocrat manual (which you find, in-game) read she freaks out and shuts the whole thing down. very much prefer that approach to 'you have said enough nice things to me, want to gently caress'
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2024 18:06 |
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achtungnight posted:I played through the Lann romance and found it painful and unsatisfying for many reasons. The Daeran romance was similar. The Female PC on Male NPC romances in this game are just not well-written in many ways. I'm not quoting specifics to avoid spoilers, just trust me. oh, Cassia's good at heart, will not betray your trust, and trusts you. implicitly, even! all it takes is a single comment from you saying the mute servants thing is a little hosed for her to have it undone effective immediately, regardless of any kind of romance path, she's that worried about inadvertently offending her peers! but she has also been raised to be a good little aristocrat, and so getting the heart of gold to the surface without breaking it or her is going to require a protracted and complicated mining operation, and nobody is going to blame you for saying "hey, what if I went after someone who -isn't- a fixer-upper." idonotlikepeas posted:I also remember Daeran being a pain in the rear end about his romance. I think I said a couple of polite things to him and he assumed we were DTF more or less immediately. the fun convergence of "totally in character" and "still insufferable"
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2024 19:31 |
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Szarrukin posted:Before one patch fixed/broke it, you could have your first sex scene in Baldur's Gate 3 sooner than in most hentai games. I believe world record was... about 2 minutes after character creation? the best part was that the way you got it was just "be a real rear end in a top hat to everyone you meet" the Would Be Lawful Evil If 5E Had Lawful Evil As An Alignment lizard lady absolutely despises the rest of your party and takes you trying to tell her what to do as an exciting challenge to her authority, as a result of which after saying about four mean things she was ready to roll. evidently the root problem was that somebody had misplaced a zero in the Affection Points Required To Bone setting across the board. this had some very funny results after the Let's All Become Marginally Less Horny patch, where people's various relationship statuses were caught in limbo, and the correct tech support answer was "have you tried turning the relationship off and on again"
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2024 22:25 |
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SettingSun posted:It always amused me that when you ask the opinion of your buds about whether or not to rescue the hellknights only a few of them give a response that isn't a variation of 'gently caress em'. "the Knights Who Say "gently caress 'Em" are begging for help, you say"
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# ¿ Apr 13, 2024 23:22 |
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Cythereal posted:I mind him a lot less than most characters in his vein. Wrath is very explicit that Hulrun isn't a hard man making hard decisions because it gets him (and the writers) hard, he's a traumatized, barely functional wreck of a man. it is a much better take on that guy than you usually see he is genuinely committed to a good cause, and his personal issues have allowed him to take that good cause and staple "I should probably indulge every paranoid instinct I have because the alternative is being betrayed again and the cause cannot afford to lose me" onto it. he is a hosed up man making hosed up decisions, who nobody will gainsay because he used to have it under some kind of control. much more believable depiction of the problem.
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# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 16:03 |
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Szarrukin posted:Daeran and Spoiler Character, while being total assholes, at least have some interesting writing, Hulrun is just generic "burn the heretic" dude. disagreed! generic burn the heretic dude is, you are correct, dull as dishwater. but the question "who put this idiot in charge" is usually left strategically unanswered, because "the writer wanted that stock character for our heroes to epically and deservedly own" takes some of the fun out of epically and deservedly owning them. there is an established reason why Hulrun is in charge, and there is an established reason why nobody has called him out on what a poo poo he has become, which makes you the newcomer coming along and epically and deservedly owning him feel a LOT more earned than when you announce "has anyone noticed this guy sucks" to a town that somehow evaded that realization right up until the PC said it out loud. everyone knows what Hulrun has become sucks. but the guy he was before peeks out juuuust often enough that people can convince themselves no, really, it's still worth it to put up with his increasingly paranoid and deranged poo poo. nobody tells you "he's making the Necessary Choices." they tell you "...he didn't use to be this bad." and that makes him a lot more interesting a character, and significantly more satisfying to dunk into the center of the earth!
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 04:23 |
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:manic pixie dream wizard
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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 17:08 |
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i like Regill as a character because the ability to speech check your way into everyone putting their differences aside and forming one big happy family annoys me. it's a fun fantasy and all! but courtesy of game design being game design, it culminates in a weird system where there's the people with voice acting, who can all be talked out of being bad people, and the people without, who can be killed in uncountable numbers without any qualms. in a large group, sharing a common goal, there are going to be people who believe wrong, stupid, and indeed horrible things you disagree with. and are on your side anyway, for their own reasons. they will not be talked out of believing them, because they arrived at those beliefs for a reason beyond "nobody ever asked me to stop being an rear end in a top hat nicely enough" Regill is an awful little nightmare of a man, who is nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is, and has the ability to help you out (some) if you're willing to put up with his poo poo. asking the question "how do you handle this guy" is an interesting one. congrats, you are in the driver's seat of a powerful organization. meet Literally The First Problem Every Leader Encounters. what do.
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# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 19:33 |
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Gun Jam posted:Actually, let's cycle back a bit: here we delve into the problems of modern sensibilities vs. the way the vast majority of armies operated up until approximately the 1800s, and even then, the criticality of supply lines was a lot more conditional a thing until around WW1. to be a little reductive, up until you're having to care and feed for artillery, the way a military unit keeps itself operational is 'forage,' which is a polite euphemism for 'steal food and supplies from anyone you run across.' for quite a while there, the army defending you, John Civilian, was almost totally indistinguishable from the army attacking you. this is part of why the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, in that order; the commoner's experience of warfare was that soldiers are going to steal your food, you are going to get sick, and then you are all going to die. from what we've seen from Regill, this would very much be up his alley. of course, this also meant that if the terrain -didn't- have a bunch of peasants lying around you could extort food from, any army moving through that area would immediately die horribly. there is a funny(?) case study of this in the form of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, where he discovered that unlike fertile, richly-peasanted Italy, trying to forage in rural Egypt involved a lot of dying of thirst and heat stroke. it's hard to draw a conclusion either way, because it -could- be the writers assuming that as a moron, Regill hasn't brought enough supplies for his guys. it also could be the writers assuming that this is Regill getting his guys into Forager Mindset. it also could be the writers assuming this is Regill getting his guys into Forager Mindset without accounting for the fact there are no peasants to forage off of in the Worldwound.
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# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 21:03 |
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Rorahusky posted:Trickster trolls Regill so well that the PC's actions end up completely curing Regil's Bleaching out of sheer /shock/ over what the PC did, and Regill immediately dedicates the rest of his life to desperately unfucking what the PC did. most of Trickster ends up falling flat. demonstrating that everything Regill has ever believed in was a pointless lie is quite satisfying.
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# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 22:36 |
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his being a gnome does add a fun extra degree to the character, aside from the comedic value of What If A Lawn Ornament Was A Fascist. i mentioned Tyranny earlier, and Regill's a fun riff on a character who appears there too. Barik is a metaphor played completely straight. he has been a loyal soldier of the Disfavored, who are a hypermilitarized, hyperdisciplined, ethnic supremacist cult of personality around their leader, Graven Ashe. Barik went on a mission for his boss that involved walking into, essentially, a magical nuke. He survived, but just barely, his fine armor now mangled and inextricably fused to his body. He is described repeatedly as "a walking midden," because his unthinking loyalty to the man who sent him to die for stupid reasons has literally trapped him inside his armor and stewing in his own poo poo. unsurprisingly, his personal quest is about finding a way to get him out of his armor. barring some very specific choices being made by you, it is going to conclude with "you'd have to get him to forsake his beloved god-commander, and that will not be happening." soldiers who are very, very literally being killed by the thing they believe in, and the only way to save their lives is to get them to stop believing it, and if you try to do that they will fight you every step of the way. nice way to introduce the concept of the fascist death drive to You The Audience without having to spend a couple of hours on interbellum continental philosophy
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# ¿ Apr 22, 2024 18:00 |
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:There's probably some context missing, but while crass, it doesn't really strike me as evil "alignment was a poorly conceived and implemented mechanic" sums up almost all alignment discussions depending on the writer and scenario, all of good, evil, law, and chaos whipsaw wildly between "being stupidly self-indulgent" and "being stupidly self-sacrificing." you weren't willing to sacrifice a bunch of dudes because you might need them later? clearly evil behavior. also good behavior. also lawful behavior. also chaotic behavior.
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 23:48 |
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achtungnight posted:Why couldn’t you say “I’ll kill you because you tried to kill me and unlike Nok-Nok the good green-skinned guy here, you’ll try again if I don’t stop you now” and leave racism out of it? you are looking for any of the Obsidian rpgs from New Vegas onwards, where alignment is a matter of reputation tracked individually among factions and not a cosmic ledger of Good/Bad Guy Points. Owlcat wise, Rogue Trader -slightly- improves on this, in that instead of the 2-axis 3x3 matrix of Good/Bad Guy Points there are tree types of Alignment Points you can get for doing stuff: Insane Theocratic Fascist, Insane Demon Worshipping Cultist, and Trying Very Hard To Be Decent In A Universe That Fights Your Efforts At Every Turn. this at least results in a less confused mess than "look, the character sheet says I'm lawful good, I just killed that truckful of puppies that one time"
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:58 |
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the army system feels extremely undercooked as a mechanic, yes
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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 03:43 |
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i find myself really liking the concept, tbh. modern fantasy stories are weaker for the assumption that if you encounter a random mystical fucker who knows more than he lets on, he must be secretly involved in your story, and will ultimately reveal his true reasons when the time is right. no, sometimes there's just a mystical fucker dropping obtuse hints. you may safely assume he has a reason. he may have a better reason for refusing to share it with you than spite, but you will never know. feel free to ignore him and move on, but if you're in the market for obtuse hints, you know where to get them. you so rarely see a proper narrative wizard these days.
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# ¿ May 1, 2024 05:02 |
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yeah, someone at Owlcat is fond of their body horror sequences. they are also fond of their "get to completely gently caress over an ancient evil who is very, VERY mad at you for not doing exactly as they'd expected" sequences though so it's hard to stay mad at them
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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:06 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 06:52 |
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Capfalcon posted:Nurah is an interesting character with very understandable motivations, but you really do have to wonder about the interview process for being in the leadership of the Crusade if "former slave of crusader who mysteriously died but she turned up all fine" didn't raise any red flags. the thing about fighting demons is a lot of people mysteriously die
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# ¿ May 14, 2024 16:40 |