Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 10:04 pm

Prak wrote:I think it's literally exactly as shitty, and has only a modicum more point in that it actually provides a meaningful alternative to going out and getting into bar fights for WP regain.

I personally would never use Princess' Bell in a game, because I have a problem with the idea of beating cats to death, even fictional ones, and especially for "gain." I would probably never use UTWB either. My point was that if "but it has a drawback!" is Omegon's defense of the item, there's no reason a magic whiskey bottle couldn't have the exact same drawback, and at least be marginally less morally reprehensible to use, and actually do something.

I wasn't defending the item because it has a weakness, I was condemning it for having that weakness in an nWoD game. White Wolf hated player agency after all - saying "there exists a way this item can stop working" is tantamount to asking that it be taken away.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 10:13 pm

Dont know (or care) what this is based on, but it has a few neat ideas in it:

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2015/0 ... ref=tw&m=1

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 11:58 pm

Ancient History wrote:
Longes wrote:
Their schtick is that they are hikikomori librarians related to Fae. Which in oWoD means Changelings. Whom we have discussed on this board before.
Finally, their signature discipline Mytherceria is dumb and weak. You get to know when people lie to you, you get to see changelings, you get to remove auras from objects and you get two no-save mindfucking powers.
Believe it or not, it seems to get more fucked up with every edition.

What I loved to hate about the Kiasyd is that they're the ultimate special magical butterflies of the setting; in 2nd edition their three disciplines were Mythceria, Necromancy, and Obtenebration - so two clan-specific disciplines and one bloodline-specific disciplines. Then they introduced the Angelus Ater, the Baali version of things...

I'd go one step further: They are the ultimate special magical butterflies of the setting for players who *don't* want to actually play but want to feel more special than anyone else in the game. Because if you're playing a Kiasyd properly you don't do anything. Even the books say "What do you do? 'Read for 200 years'"

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 8:51 am

fectin wrote:Dont know (or care) what this is based on, but it has a few neat ideas in it:

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2015/0 ... ref=tw&m=1

I do think that there should be discussions of what grains are used and where empires grow and shit in worlds. Otherwise we end up with bullshit like the Master Race's Handbook, where Elves apparently eat "delicate" wild game rather than course bread and domesticated animals.

And I really like the idea of having it be fluid and circumstance dependent whether to consider someone an Orc or a Human. I could even totally be on-board with having the kingdom builder game encourage you to bankrupt your empire building giant pagodas and pyramids. But the thing about people turning into Apes for having unpopular political views is crazy in the way of "if implemented at the table is almost certain to result in friends refusing to talk to each other if not actual fist fights." It's an idea so bad that it would probably crash and burn actual out of game friendships in addition to the game in question. Like, I'm honestly amazed that someone would write an idea that terrible down in a place other people could see it.

-Username17

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 3:45 pm

Looks like L5R is not the only game to say "tournament results matter" and then have tournament results be irrelevant.

Warfailmmer

TvTropes wrote:The results of various worldwide tournaments were submitted to determine the fate of the planet Medusa V. The Space Marines and Imperial Guard lost a good majority of their battles; the former due to Space Marines being the usual go-to army for novice players, and the latter because they were consistently bottom-tier. However, the Space Marines were (and still are) far and away the most popular army of the game, and seeing a Space Marine defeat as a serious setback to the brand's image, Games Workshop declared that even though the Space Marines and Imperial Guard lost the majority of their battles, they were still the canon winners of the campaign on moral grounds note . Understandably, the players of the other factions were less than pleased.

Did any company ever manage to interact with community on its metaplot and not have it crash and burn horribly?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:18 pm

I understand there was some cool stuff happening with the Badab war in 40k. Lugft Huron went from

to

Because he got a glancing hit with a melta on his right side, an event that happened on tabletop.

Then they had the 13th Crusade stuff, where it was judged to be a minor victory for Chaos--that is, Chaos has not been kicked back into the Eye of Terror.

But GW's been milking that one for years, probably because having an in-setting grinding stalemate means they don't have to do any story work for a while.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:50 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:But the thing about people turning into Apes for having unpopular political views is crazy in the way of "if implemented at the table is almost certain to result in friends refusing to talk to each other if not actual fist fights." It's an idea so bad that it would probably crash and burn actual out of game friendships in addition to the game in question. Like, I'm honestly amazed that someone would write an idea that terrible down in a place other people could see it.

-Username17

Right. Let me clarify: has some good ideas. Other ideas are incoherent or bad instead.

edit: Though, on reflection, I think that could be made workable. You'd want to build it in up front, and it would be a very weird game.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 10:05 pm

Longes wrote:Did any company ever manage to interact with community on its metaplot and not have it crash and burn horribly?

Not that I know of. I used to be all about 40k and the Eye of Terror event was so bullshit I stopped playing.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Mon Feb 02, 2015 4:42 am

You certainly don't want to say "Oh, yeah, libertarians turn into bonobos because of their political opinions", but it might be fine to say "the last members of the resistance to Akkad II ran off into the woods and lived like werewolves and that's where gorillas come from"

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 8:34 am

Exalted 3e got leaked. There are many things I can say about it, but I'll only say two.

1. Infernals have been purged from the setting for some reason. It was obviously done in a hurry, because there are still occasional hints and pointers that should lead to them.

2. The book is 950 pages without formatting, covers and art. 950 fucking pages. War and Peace is 1200 pages (though not A4)! This is ridiculous! That's almost three times the size of Shadowrun 4th Anniversary Edition! What the shit people?! Who is going to read 950 pages of fucking Exalted? 431000 words! It's almost as long as the Old fucking Testament! Gah.

Also they apparently still don't have all the art they need, nor the artists to make that art. Two fucking years after kickstarter promised to send the books.

Also Lunars are back to their 1e fluff.

The Lunar Exalted were created to be the Solars’ seconds, their spouses, and the sacred guardians of the Old Realm. The bond defined the Lunars; it sang within their very Essence.
So too did the bond’s destruction. The Old Realm fell; the Solars were murdered, their spirits banished beyond Lunar ken. The Lunars changed. They’re still changing. A deep rage lives in their Essence, and a deep wound. Their sleep is tormented by visions of loss, of murder, of the past. The Lunars are compelled to shatter the chains binding them to the past—to tear down the stolen remnants of the First Age, to raze the Sidereal and Terrestrial hegemony that dares to wear the ancient name of the Realm. The Silver Pact exists to facilitate this.

Silent Wayfarer · Post by **Silent Wayfarer** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 8:54 am

wot.

Well, that sucks.

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 11:34 am

Can you tell me where you found the leaked document? Or possibly make it available? I find myself oddly curious.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 11:42 am

Schleiermacher wrote:Can you tell me where you found the leaked document? Or possibly make it available? I find myself oddly curious.

On 4chan.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 12:11 pm

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=151781

I'm still seething with rage. I now know that I'll never play Exalted 3ed not because it's shit, but because it's too damn long for me to bother reading through it.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 10:19 am

Holden confirmed that the leak is the final document. Well, fuck.

Also Solars are still glorious special snowflakes. They are the only ones who get the last tier of new Evocations system (in addition to being the only ones with the last tier of Sorcery and the best charms), and the only ones who can learn Evocations as native charms. Fuck Solars.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 10:31 am

Would Exalted be a better game if solars, lunars, sidereals, and dragonbloods all started on equal footing? Then the thing with solars being the former rules is more them holding the most secrets and amassing the most experience early on.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 10:37 am

OgreBattle wrote:Would Exalted be a better game if solars, lunars, sidereals, and dragonbloods all started on equal footing? Then the thing with solars being the former rules is more them holding the most secrets and amassing the most experience early on.

It's okay for Solars to be better than everyone else if Solars are the only type of Exalted you can play. But as is, the schtick Solars have is "better than you in your area of specialty". And that kinda shits all over non-Solars. Lunar can come in with the concept of "Best Conan who ever Conaned", and then meet Solar who is better at fighting, wilderness survival, and everything else, even though fighting and wilderness survival are explicit Lunar strengths.

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 11:40 am

Um...yes? That has always been an explicit and deliberate part of Exalted.

You're not actually intended to play a rainbow coalition of different Exalted types like you were the Legion of Superheroes -usually a game will either be all about one type, or the players who pick something other than Solars are deliberately taking a role in the story that doesn't hinge on them being the best at whatever it is they do.

Now, that might make you and OgreBattle disinterested in playing anything but Solars, which is perfectly fine of course, but I wouldn't say it's "shitting all over" the other kinds of Exalted when no-one who knew what's what has ever pretended that their raison d'etre was about being better than Solars at anything. It's true that personal combat and survival skills are Lunar strengths, but that's compared to Lunar skills in other fields -e.g they're not so hot at things like bureaucratic administration or large-scale crafting, fields where their "cannibal shapeshifter" schtick isn't as easily applicable. "Best Conan who ever Conaned" is a Solar character concept. If you're a Lunar, you're playing "Cannibal Shapeshifter Conan", which is something a Solar can't really be. (Two possible exceptions: Abyssals are better at necromancy and Sidereals are in certain ways better at martial arts.)

Also note that of course, in any given group a character can be the best in the group at something without being a Solar - "Solar > You" is only true as long as the Solar is also invested in the same area to a comparable degree. (A lesser degree, probably, but none of the rules for non-Solars exist in 3E yet so we don't know the particulars there yet.)

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 11:52 am

However, we already know that only Solars can fully interact with the new Evocation system.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 6:50 pm

The "it's not supposed to be balanced!" dodge of Exalted doesn't hold water and never ever did. Exalted is a game that is on a fucking point system. If you want a "typical" Solar to be more powerful than a Lunar or Abyssal or whatever, you can give them more points! If people want to play Lunars and Solars together, they can have an atypically powerful Lunar travel with a typically powerful Solar, or whatever. And this can be done by the simple expedient of giving more points to the Lunar until they are even.

Except it fucking can't be, because despite the fact that Exalted is on a god damn point system where every fucking bonus and power has a point cost assigned to it, power disparities are enforced by simply having the various things you can buy from Column A and Column B be ludicrously comparable and imbalanced. That is atrocious design. It is laughably atrocious design. It was laughably atrocious design that we laughed at in 2002. There is no fucking excuse for it to still be like this. There was no excuse for it to be like this in 1st edition, and it's just sort jaw dropping that OPP wants to be taken seriously in 2015 if they aren't going to fix this shit.

-Username17

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 7:59 pm

See, I don't think it's a dodge -that would imply the designers and audience of Exalted consider the imbalance between Exalted kinds to be a flaw that needs defending, while in my experience most of them consider it a feature. (Not all of them -there's a significant minority who disagree, particularly among Lunar fans.) It's simply not a priority for them that you should be able to build a Lunar who's exactly as powerful as a given Solar, so why should they devote effort to "fixing" that rather than getting Column A (In this case, Solar powers) and Column B (Lunar powers) to work the way they want them to on their own merits? The way they see it, Solars and Lunars are apples and oranges, not different character classes.

Now having said that, I don't want to go too far in my defense of the design of Exalted -in many ways it's a bloated and cumbersome system, and it's far too preoccupied with mechanical differentiation for its own sake. And 3E, sad to say, seems to be a further step in the wrong direction in that area, despite some much-needed streamlining.

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 8:06 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
fectin wrote:Dont know (or care) what this is based on, but it has a few neat ideas in it:

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2015/0 ... ref=tw&m=1
I do think that there should be discussions of what grains are used and where empires grow and shit in worlds. Otherwise we end up with bullshit like the Master Race's Handbook, where Elves apparently eat "delicate" wild game rather than course bread and domesticated animals.

And I really like the idea of having it be fluid and circumstance dependent whether to consider someone an Orc or a Human. I could even totally be on-board with having the kingdom builder game encourage you to bankrupt your empire building giant pagodas and pyramids. But the thing about people turning into Apes for having unpopular political views is crazy in the way of "if implemented at the table is almost certain to result in friends refusing to talk to each other if not actual fist fights." It's an idea so bad that it would probably crash and burn actual out of game friendships in addition to the game in question. Like, I'm honestly amazed that someone would write an idea that terrible down in a place other people could see it.

-Username17

You are now quoted at the top of his article, Frank.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 9:20 pm

Schleiermacher wrote:See, I don't think it's a dodge -that would imply the designers and audience of Exalted consider the imbalance between Exalted kinds to be a flaw that needs defending, while in my experience most of them consider it a feature. (Not all of them -there's a significant minority who disagree, particularly among Lunar fans.) It's simply not a priority for them that you should be able to build a Lunar who's exactly as powerful as a given Solar, so why should they devote effort to "fixing" that rather than getting Column A (In this case, Solar powers) and Column B (Lunar powers) to work the way they want them to on their own merits? The way they see it, Solars and Lunars are apples and oranges, not different character classes.

Now having said that, I don't want to go too far in my defense of the design of Exalted -in many ways it's a bloated and cumbersome system, and it's far too preoccupied with mechanical differentiation for its own sake. And 3E, sad to say, seems to be a further step in the wrong direction in that area, despite some much-needed streamlining.

The problem goes deeper. The core setting conceit is that everyone sucks dicks without Solars to save them. All Exalted in the world did jack shit in the thousand years of solar non-existence, and Solars being the only ones who can save the world is the premise of the setting. That's why Solars returning is a big deal, rather than just another pile of pawns for top-dogs to manipulate. And that's okay, if Solars are the one and only playable type. And it's okay for Dragon-Blooded, because they don't operate on the setting-wide scale. Dragon-Blooded play their little political games, and fight over the presidency of anime club of East, while Solars actually solve the looming apocalypse. But White Wolf, and now Onyx Path, actually sells books devoted to playing Lunars and Dragon-Blooded and shit, while the setting is still in the state of "Find a Solar to solve the important problems". And that is terrible.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 9:50 pm

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're going to write your game to be over four hundred and thirty thousand words, and you only have five playable classes, you've failed so hard that I'm not even mad. That's not even a serious offering.

It's years late, it's twice the word count it has any right to be, and it doesn't cover a quarter of the content it promised. It's shoddy, unfinished, and totally lacking any design. It's not even a game, it's just one of those "books" that copypastas wikipedia articles or something. I'm not mad at Exalted 3rd edition, because there obviously is no Exalted 3rd edition and there was probably never any serious plans to make one.

They just ran a bunch of internet rantings about Exalted by some internet fans of Exalted into a big rambling text, and called that a book. It's not a book. It's just a bunch of rambling.

-Username17

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 9:57 pm

Longes wrote:stuff that is wrong

I categorically disagree that that is a "core setting conceit", or even true. It was an impression that certain parts of 2E worked very hard to give, true -but that was always shitty and not the intent.

The Solars returning is not a big deal because they are the only ones who can save the world, it's a big deal because they are the most powerful of the Exalted and everyone thought they were gone forever and now they're back like the world's greatest wild card. That is the premise of the setting.

As for things that the Exalted did while the Solars were gone - At the top of the list, the one character in the entire setting who definitely has saved the world at least once is a Dragon-Blooded - the Scarlet Empress. (Yes, she did it by activating and taking control of a First Age weapon -but without something like the Defense Grid to leverage no Solar could have done anything meaningful in her place, either.) Then you have:

- "Unify the post-apocalyptic remains of humanity and the Terrestrial Exalted into a world-dominating empire" (that would be the Scarlet Empress again, and the empire she created that her dynasty fights over in her absence is hardly an "anime club")

-"Create a world-spanning religion to legitimize, but also check, the power of the Dragon-Blooded and keep the Terrestrial Gods in line" (Chejop Kejak and the Bronze Faction)

-"Defy the aforementioned world-dominating empire in its own backyard and create a confederation of independent nations there that endures to this day" (The Seventh Legion of Lookshy)

-"Steal his own fate from the Bureau of Destiny and make war on Heaven" (Rakan Thulio)

-and a hundred thousand more local things that individual Exalted did because they wanted things to be this way and not that way, which is what the game is actually about, as opposed to "solving looming apocalypses".