Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[virgil]

I guess allegories are all racist, by this logic? A shame, I liked District 9.

[Midnight_v]

*ahem*
While it is my habit to occasionally swagger drunk into the gaming den and get incensed by something and rant. . .

I doesn't change the fact that when I wake up the next morning and re-read what you've wrote, it remains offensive.

I'm guessing that you think this belittles the sufferings of and achievements of black people. I'd like it if you could elaborate on this. Likewise with the internment camps.

What makes this going too far?

Basically, the highlighted part.
Its at its root offensive because it totally marginalizes what actually happened. Black people and deep ones are the same thing in your story. I don't know if thats intentional or not, but to read that as an African American, that shit sucks, if Martin Luther King was a deep one (in the story and in MOST peoples minds therefore an inhuman monster) then all those fucking lynchings, police setting dogs lose and firemen shooting my grandparents with water... what? Happened to the deep ones I guess. No I get it, it happened to the Deep One's "Too", well fuck you, No.

I guess allegories are all racist, by this logic? A shame, I liked District 9.

A goodly number of people considered district 9 racist too.
All allegories aren't racist but its a dick move to tell the story of apartheid, with Aliens as the Victims, and have black people portrayed as bad guys in that same movie ....

Wait. Let me stop there... did the holocaust happen, in your world? Do you think it'd be okay to have Anne Frank be a deep one too? So the little girl in hiding in her attic gets taken to die in a concentration camp, could easily be a deep one right?
Diary of Ithyuk Orgeen, or some such?

The part where you go wrong is the part where you take the stories of people who are/were actually marginalized in their lifetime or at least the lifetime of their parents and replace those struggles with something else, especially when that something is ostensibly TOTALLY INHUMAN.

You're right Midnight_V, we don't care what you have to say. That was completely and totally incoherent.

-Username17

That's okay Frank. This is the first time in my life I've tried to explain how something is "racist" to a group of what I'd assume to be Caucasians. I've never done that because having a white person immediately say "We don't care what you have to say" is actually what I expected and have witnessed happen when the attempt is made. Figured someone would just call me racially sensitive and be done with it.

So basically, your black friend walks into a room, says "Dudes? 'the fuck are you doing to that picture of MLK? That shits looks racist as fuck!
TheGAMINGDEN: Dude you're drunk. Gtfo.
Blackfriend:

The idea isn't that Africa is run by monkey people, but rather than Giant Evil Gorillas and Giant Evil Snakes are pouring out of smouldering craters in the jungle to attack major African cities and the PCs have to stop them

Sure. In that case it could be spelled out a little better then, it just didn't sound that way and I'll post what made it sound the other way if you like, I could be wrong. Also however, Grek, the metaphor's you're using ride a razors edge, which might not matter because I'm likely one of the few non-white people to read this, so honestly you can do what you want but the whole Mlk thing easily misinterpreted, and the Gorrilla's in africa thing too.

The rest of what I wrote, the thing about Power Rangers vs Tagers/Venom or whatever, is just flavoring etc.
So... on the Power Rangers

A page ago someone mentioned "A Colder War" by Charles Stross and I think that was actually a good guide for how the historical parts of this should look, and how the story should go. It would do well as a point of reference too.

What's the point of adding mecha to cosmic horror if you're not going to punch something's face in?

I didn't say "don't punch things face in", an honestly you guys got the Cthulhu thing right, letting him be some superweapon that pops up sometimes and eats the mind of everyone within a 200 mile radius.

I say its nothing scary about this because, it kind of misses the point, that actual Cthuhutech gets right.
"In the process of fighting monsters..." basically.
The horrible part about the story is the spotlight on what happens to us as humanity the more we fight these things.

That being said I actually do understand that all your saying is that in you story the "Deep Ones" replace the "Nazzadi" as the default alt human.
No biggie, but the tag lines for your story/game are much more laughable in my book.

Cthulhutech - Guyver and Evengelion, and Macross Vs. Cthulhu!
Sounds awesome

Hyzmarca-tech - Power Rangers, Pokemon, and Sailor Moon Vs Cthulhu!

Sounds absurd.

Which isn't to say your having bad wrong fun if thats what you want, it fine. Many people not be able to take that seriously though. I guess cause in my head I wrongfully associate sailor moons with rainbow bright , carebears, and my little pony (which some people love) but...
Sailor Moon vs Cthulhu is a hentai. No, I mean an actual hentai named Venus 5 and some people are going to love that type of shit, but in the end you're basically making something with as many mistakes as the original thing your deviating from.

...oh and fuck you guys, I hope you crash into a used colostomy bag truck.

[virgil]

I guess allegories are all racist, by this logic? A shame, I liked District 9.

A goodly number of people considered district 9 racist too.
All allegories aren't racist but its a dick move to tell the story of apartheid, with Aliens as the Victims, and have black people portrayed as bad guys in that same movie ....

In District 9, humans were bad guys. The protagonist had to go through karmic hell just to get a semblance of a conscience; which to most people I know, still doesn't make up for his earlier behavior. The wife was certainly not good, a stereotypical woman in an ivory tower. The only human who could be argued a good guy is Fundiswa.

Can't really argue against the cannibalism subplot though, but that's a different argument on any inherent racism in the movie.

[Midnight_v]

I guess allegories are all racist, by this logic? A shame, I liked District 9.

A goodly number of people considered district 9 racist too.
All allegories aren't racist but its a dick move to tell the story of apartheid, with Aliens as the Victims, and have black people portrayed as bad guys in that same movie ....

In District 9, humans were bad guys. The protagonist had to go through karmic hell just to get a semblance of a conscience; which to most people I know, still doesn't make up for his earlier behavior. The wife was certainly not good, a stereotypical woman in an ivory tower. The only human who could be argued a good guy is Fundiswa.

Can't really argue against the cannibalism subplot though, but that's a different argument on any inherent racism in the movie.

Uhm. Ok?
I don't have an argument with you about that movie really. however if you google you can find some arguments about that movie. I remember when it came out people were bitching about it for various reasons.
The main one I actually remember was more so about the portrayal of the black people in the movie being portrayed as criminals.
In the end though, I can't argue with you about it in truth because its a movie I have personally never seen.
However, in a bubble if someone from South Africa told me "dude that movie is dick, it totally demeans our struggle" I wouldn't doubt that dude at his word. . . Like at all. Why the fuck would I? I have no fucking clue how that's looked at culturally from his perspective. I wouldn't think "oh this dudes fucking tripping over little shit or what not, but people totally do shit like that all the time.
Though again, I can't say "fully" because I skipped that film, but I can totally a priori understand why some people would be like "oh fuck no..." about a story of apartheid in set in Africa (where apartheid actually happened) where the black people in the story AREN'T completely like "OH FUCK NO!" your miles may vary, on that one though Virgil.
I'm still hung over so I can only hope I'm being more coherent, to all the people who bitch, whine, and moan that sort of thing.

[Username17]

I want you to imagine for a moment that someone took the following two statements:

• In a fantasy future where the Earth is being invaded by a number of alien and magical beings, one on the enemies is a group of hyper intelligent gorillas that are plaguing the human nations of Africa.
• In a fantasy future where the Earth is being invaded by a number of alien and magical beings, foreigners are kidnapping and raping our women in order to breed an army of subhuman half-breeds.

... and concluded by virtue of being a fucking idiot that the first was somehow more racist than the second.

Now I want you to stop imagining that because you, Midnight_V actually fucking did that. That is because you are a fucktarded subhuman asshole who is not worth listening to in this or any other circumstance.

Go fuck yourself forever,
-Username17

[Grek]

You know, calling people subhuman because they say you're being racist is not exactly a good way to demonstrate that you're not actually racist.

[Username17]

You know, calling people subhuman because they say you're being racist is not exactly a good way to demonstrate that you're not actually racist.

If Midnight_V wanted to not be called a subhuman half-breed, he should have thought of that before he said that the scenario "foreigners kidnap and rape our women in order to create an army of subhuman half-breeds and overwhelm us" was "less racist" than, well, anything at all. If he, or anyone else, objects to being called a subhuman half-breed and thinks they have any cause at all for doing so, then Midnight_V is directly and obviously full of so much shit that if we beat the shit out of him he would be nothing more than a ragged windsock of skin.

-Username17

[Dr_Noface]

May have a point about the MLK thing though.

[hyzmarca]

You know, I threw together the original timeline on a lark in about five minutes and didn't actually expect it to be taken seriously, but I threw in the parts were JFK and MLK survived because I thought that those were really cool consequences for the altered timeline rather than a series of bleak series of "it got worse." Dr. King lives to see his dream fulfilled, and that is objectively a good thing.

The problem with adding any new oppressed minority to the timeline is that you have to deal with the civil rights issue. The hard way to do that is to completely screw the timeline by making a separate and unrelated civil rights movement, segregated from the original.
The easy way is to roll the two together and just have the bizarro-60s with a soundtrack by Jimmi Hendrix.

I love Jimmi Hendrix.


There is only one important question here. Would MLK allow Deep Ones to march with him? The answer to that is an unequivocal "yes". Dr. King was not the sort of person to judge a man by the color of his scales. MLK was a genuinely good and decent person who genuinely believed in equality. He would most certainly march with a Deep One, because he was a good person who believed in equality.

Segregating the two civil rights movements would be terrible disservice to Dr. King. He'd include Deep Ones in his protests because it is the right thing to do.

[Midnight_v]

You know, calling people subhuman because they say you're being racist is not exactly a good way to demonstrate that you're not actually racist.

If Midnight_V wanted to not be called a subhuman half-breed, he should have thought of that before he said that the scenario "foreigners kidnap and rape our women in order to create an army of subhuman half-breeds and overwhelm us" was "less racist" than, well, anything at all. If he, or anyone else, objects to being called a subhuman half-breed and thinks they have any cause at all for doing so, then Midnight_V is directly and obviously full of so much shit that if we beat the shit out of him he would be nothing more than a ragged windsock of skin.

-Username17

No, Frank.... All hyperbole aside... as someone who I PERSONALLY Like and respect, you're just wrong about this one. I of course started it with the colostomy bag thing, but I'm not full of shit. I have zero fucking motive to negative to anything you've ever produced. You're just wrong this one, brethren.

Would MLK allow Deep Ones to march with him? The answer to that is an unequivocal "yes". Dr. King was not the sort of person to judge a man by the color of his scales

I didn't know that you threw that together on a lark no.

I think another issue is the basic premise that "Deepones are people too" maybe because in shadow over Innsmouth they're monsters possibly rape monsters and even then thinly veiled metaphors for the way Lovecraft actually felt about foreigners.

Ultimately, You really have to write this in such a way that "eveything you've heard about deepones is wrong"... is a central meme in the story.
That might work, but the give them their own thing instead of just stapling them into existing people struggles.
As a group of people who are pretty cool otherwise I hope you guys hear me on that one. Good luck.

[hyzmarca]

That might work, but the give them their own thing instead of just stapling them into existing people struggles.

Oh, of course. The two civil rights movements work together, but they're not exactly the same thing. The Deep Ones, for example, don't have much of a problem in the South. A "White" Deep One can sit at a segregated lunch counter in Mississippi and no one will complain out loud. Most of the anti-Deep One legislation is in around coastal New England, where they have major populations, rather than in the South, where they're relatively few. So while they have common cause with the African-American civil rights movement, the two have different areas of concern.

Deep Ones are people, too, is a central premise, of course. The assumption is that Lovecraft's narrators are usually unreliable racist fuckwits, which they are.


About the other thing, I think we have a bit more wiggle room than you suspect.

For one thing, Sailor Moon is all about a bunch of Lovecraftian cosmic horrors that look like little girls and wear tutus and fight other meaner cosmic horrors. Usagi may look and act like a ditzy teen, but she's literally the reincarnation of a million-year-old immortal princess whose soul is a magic crystal that's also the soul of the moon. She fights things like incarnations of hate that were born in the sun and time-traveling incarnations of murder from the rouge planet nemesis.

But we're also adding a little bit of Puella Magi to that shit. A Majoko's life is going to end in one of two possible ways, a violent death from overusing her powers or falling to the darkside and becoming a twisted monster fueled by hatred and despair. Retirement is just a stop gap, of course, because the temptation is always there, and the feeling of impotence. So, eventually, every one of those "chosen" kids will either die in a blaze of glory or become so embittered by having that power but being unable to use it they forsake everything that they once loved.

And since Nyarlathotep is playing Kyubey here, this is a feature, not a bug.

Concerning the mons, our pokemon is colored by Digimon Tamers, which is fucking brutal for a kids show, Card Captor Sakura (which is done by CLAMP, who are fucking brutal for shoujo artists) and Yu-Gi-Oh, which has people getting their souls ripped out and minds destroyed over something so trivial as a collectable card game, not to mention the outright murders.

Pokemon is a cute show, yeah. But you turn up the realism dial and take that stuff seriously, it's really horrible.


And the Power Rangers stuff plays back into how fucked you have to be in order to seriously consider recruiting teenagers with attitude.

This is a situation were the government is openly using child soldiers to fight monsters that drive men insane. While they certainly put some spin on it, this is totally fucked up. Everyone knows that it is fucked up. They do it anyway because they literally have no choice.


Anyway, on the Guyver front, we're already seen the conceptual problems that trying to port Guyver wholesale creates. Chrysalis Corporation is fuckstupid, and the tagger game doesn't mesh at all with the rest of the setting. Guyver really only works as a stand-alone without the rest of the baggage. Doing symbiotic bioarmor is alright, but the entire evil corporation thing and the Zoanoids, it doesn't work in a big war setting.

Now, I would love to have some bioarmoed characters, but I'd borrow much less from Guyver and more from Kamen rider on that front.

Robotech has nostalgia value, and Carl Maeck did a great job in bringing something to the States that wouldn't have gotten any play otherwise. On the other hand, Robotech kind of sucks, too. The narrative suffers from trying to smash three unrelated series together and the dialog gets pretty stupid in places. That being said, Cthulhutech most certainly uses Robotech rather than Macross. Macross is way too optimistic, and humanity becomes way too powerful too fast. Taking out everything that doesn't fit leaves us just with variable fighters, really. Cthulhutech made a rather huge mistake with the Nazzadi, because the Nazzadi was pretty much pointless.

As for Eva, we're totally doing Eva. The difference is that the Engles are only superficially related to Evangeleon while we're going full bore Shinji Ikari masturbates over his comatose teammate.
Okay, we might not be going that far. But at least we're going Rebuild on this thing.


Really, redoing Cthulhutech is kind of pointless. Earthscorpion has already done that. I don't entirely agree with him, but his revisions aren't terrible. This project isn't about improving Cthulhutech the way After Sundown was about improving nWOD, this is about taking similar premises and doing something completely different.

I mean, fuck, I absolutely hate what they did to the Deep Ones in Cthulhutech, which is why I made them good guys here.

This game also has really pro-transhumanist bent that Cthulhutech lacks, with gene-engineeing being used to provide immortality to most of the population and DNI interfaces being extremely common. This is about humanity evolving into a mythos race, rather than just fighting off mythos monsters.

[Lokathor]

Pokemon is a cute show, yeah. But you turn up the realism dial and take that stuff seriously, it's really horrible.

They did that, it's a manga called Pokemon Special (or Pokemon Adventures in the USA), and it involves (for example) Red's pikachu blowing up Brock's onyx with an overcharged thunderbolt attack (x), Red having to fight Surge not for a gym badge but because he joined Team Rocket and took over the S. S. Anne (x), and Red seeing an Arbok get cut in half in front of him (x).

Note that in Pokemon Special a trainer can send their pokemon off to do things on their own, but because the trainer isn't actually there directing them via the Trainer's Bond (tm) then the pokemon is much much worse at fighting, and in the case of Koga's Arbok it got itself killed because it just kept attacking blindly. We can probably use this as a mechanic within the game to keep "remote service" type of actions in check.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Guyver is basically Kamen Rider the comic book, which is like Super Sentai but with a smaller team of superheroes.

It's already in.

EDIT: Also, in Kamen Rider the costumes are more metal-y and less spandex-y, and they don't have mecha. But we have mecha anyway.

[Username17]

I think another issue is the basic premise that "Deepones are people too" maybe because in shadow over Innsmouth they're monsters possibly rape monsters and even then thinly veiled metaphors for the way Lovecraft actually felt about foreigners.

I think you need to go back and read this thing you wrote a few more times until you realize what a twat you are being. The original Lovecraftian depictions of Deep Ones (and also White Apes, Lamias, Goat Spawn, and so on) are extremely racist. If you play that stuff straight in the 21st century, it's still racist.

If you write about Deep Ones today, you have essentially three choices:

• Turn the story completely on its head and have the moral be "miscegenation is OK".
• Soft focus whitewash them completely so that they are just a generic fish-man monster with essentially no backstory.
• Write a story which, like the original works, is extremely racist.

That's it. That's literally the entire solution space. CthulhuTech decided to go for option 3, After Sundown went for option 2, this current project is going for option 1. There isn't another option. But in any case, ranting that a production is racist because it rejects the extremely racist premises of the 1920s source material is completely wrong. It is as wrong as it is possible to be about anything.

---

On the slightly less retarded question of MLK: firstly MLK would obviously support equal rights for Deep Ones. He supported equal rights for Native Americans, he supported equal rights for disenfranchised White Apalachians, and he supported equal rights for Hispanics. These were actual things that he actually did. Equal rights for everyone was a principle that he marched under, and he actually did mean everyone.

More importantly, while there would doubtless be various Deep One civil rights workers in the 60s, I don't actually care who they are or what they did. We're talking about events that are more than a century in the past of the current events of the game. While people may want to know what MLK and Malcolm X were doing, no one really gives a shit about what William DuBois was doing or how long Emmett Till lived, because these people are all going to be dead anyway and only the vague echoes of their legacies are felt. The names of the great thinkers and political agitators of the Deep One equality movement don't matter in the game because that shit is over and done with a hundred years before the player characters are even born.

It's like how we don't have to account for the differences in individual captains and colonels in World War II. Some shit was different, but it was a long time ago and it doesn't fucking matter.

-Username17

[Avoraciopoctules]

More importantly, while there would doubtless be various Deep One civil rights workers in the 60s, I don't actually care who they are or what they did. We're talking about events that are more than a century in the past of the current events of the game. While people may want to know what MLK and Malcolm X were doing, no one really gives a shit about what William DuBois was doing or how long Emmett Till lived, because these people are all going to be dead anyway and only the vague echoes of their legacies are felt. The names of the great thinkers and political agitators of the Deep One equality movement don't matter in the game because that shit is over and done with a hundred years before the player characters are even born.

It's like how we don't have to account for the differences in individual captains and colonels in World War II. Some shit was different, but it was a long time ago and it doesn't fucking matter.

-Username17

I mostly agree. However, when we're talking about Deep Ones, it is important to realize that some of these key civil rights activists may still be alive and perfectly healthy. They don't die from aging, so they might still be agitating for one cause or another in the present of the setting. Or be in general, they could be key Union politicians. The 8-foot-tall fish man who gives you orders and sits behind his desk most days could totally reminisce about when he was shorter and working to get Deep Ones the vote before the lunar invasion.

[Username17]

I mostly agree. However, when we're talking about Deep Ones, it is important to realize that some of these key civil rights activists may still be alive and perfectly healthy. They don't die from aging, so they might still be agitating for one cause or another in the present of the setting. Or be in general, they could be key Union politicians. The 8-foot-tall fish man who gives you orders and sits behind his desk most days could totally reminisce about when he was shorter and working to get Deep Ones the vote before the lunar invasion.

You could tell some pretty good stories with that. But the point is that we don't need to tie down exactly who those guys were or what they were doing at the time. I mean, you can have some senator you are tasked to protect go off about how back when he was an upstart kid, he worked with Malcolm X back in 1964. But I don't see any advantage in writing down explicit lists of what specific Deep Ones did that.

-Username17

[Username17]

One of the issues that Stat + Skill dicepool games have is dealing with characters that don't have skills. This gets into fairly clunky territory fairly quickly. The basic issue is that stats are things that everyone has: even if you are weak you still have strength of some kind; but skills aren't like that: you could very plausibly have no skill at all in something - especially a technical subject where you could extremely plausibly have not even a minimal familiarity with what the skill in question even is.

So naturally, most games assume that stats start at 1 and skills start at zero. Meaning that the general expectation in games like World of Darkness and Shadowrun is that your stat contribution is bigger than your skill contribution. This leads to funkiness where the game ends up needing to pull "non-proficiency penalties" out of its ass to make unskilled (but dextrous) people outperform locksmiths and shit. Also it creates the bizarre incentive of wanting to make double attribute "skilless" tests even when you have a potentially relevant skill.

It would be a plausible solution for that to give out skill levels in 2 die increments. Levels could be things like "Basic", "Expert", "Master", or other words that mean "more skilled than you'd expect a novice to be". But in any case, those would translate directly to 2 dice, 4 dice, 6 dice, and possibly more depending on how many levels of skill we have.

Fundamentally, by setting attributes on a 1-4 scale and skills on a 0,2,4,6 scale, we don't actually need to have defaulting penalties and we don't have to come up with bizarre kludges to stop people from opposing stat+skill pools with stat+stat pools.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

Wait, why do we have to have stat+stat pools?

[Username17]

Wait, why do we have to have stat+stat pools?

Same reason White Wolf and FanPro made stat+stat pools. There are some things that you want untrained people to be able to do at a level of competence that is comparable with the level of competence trained people have in the things they are good at. Most especially and obviously: we have resistance rolls. While you could make a "dodging" or "toughness" skill that was used in resistance against being killed, that would be a skill tax that would be stupid.

While it is possible to just have these "everyman" actions be rolled with much smaller piles of dice against much smaller thresholds, that is disruptive to the flow of play. People are used to a report of "2 hits" being a low-end success, and it is hard to wrap one's mind around the idea that it is supposed to be a high-end success now that you're rolling a raw Willpower test.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

That potentially works.

One thing I was considering doing, solely for mook NPCs to make generating them faster, is to give out Competencies instead of Stat+Skill.

There would be a minimum number of dice that mooks roll be default (2, for example) and then they get assigned Competencies in areas like Shooting and Running, which have a numerical value. Thus a mook with Shooting 4 would roll 4 dice when shooting. One with Soak 10 would have 10 soak dice. And you don't have to worry about fiddling with stat and skill combos, you just give him Competencies in the things you want him to do.

[Lokathor]

Alright the Mi Go are supposed to be strange and unknowable. And the Union Official Story is that it's just backwater Mi Go performing low-level invasions, and that the Mi Go Empire has no true goal of taking over Earth, or they would have done it already.

But first let me explain you a thing.

Many are not ever satisfied with the official story. Some of those folks subscribe to what's known as Spiral Theory. You see, in the Ryleh Rangers universe (a name I'll continue to use until someone gives me a better one) they have cartoons the same as we do. Even if you're on a war footing all the time, you need to entertain the masses or things break down. One of those cartoons is, as on earth, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Except it wasn't produced as an impossibly soft sci-fi power fantasy for teenagers, it was produced as a somewhat hard sci-fi future history.

See, in Gurren Lagann, the story goes that Humanity rose up based on "spiral power" to join with other spiral races across the universe, until one particular spiral race learned that continued use of spiral power would generate too much mass within the universe, and eventually cause it to collapse back into a super black hole and destroy everything. In response, they became the Anti-Spirals, and attacked all other Spiral races, driving the Spiral races back down to their homeworlds in the hopes of staving off the "Spiral Nemesis". The leader of Earth's spiral forces, having lost everything, takes it upon himself to keep Earth in check so that it will never again rise to the notice of the anti-spirals. In this way, he can preserve humanity for as long as possible. (Eventually some humans manage to rise up against him, and then rise up against the anti-spirals, and then save the universe.)

And that's cool and all for an anime, but again, the Union citizens don't see it as just some anime with strange trappings and impossible things. They see it as a simple post-apocalypse story like we see Mad Max or Waterworld. And, you know, maybe the government let them make the show so that anyone who got too close to the truth and started telling about it would just be called a crazy for copying ideas out of a cartoon...

And all of this is great for us, because the anti-spirals have ultimate cosmic power, but they don't use it all at once. They use it in wave after wave of ever increasing power, to try to inflict Absolute Despair upon their foes. As part of some weird philosophy they have that only despair can combat spiral energy and stuff.

And that's exactly what the Mi Go should be doing, throwing level appropriate groups at the PCs over and over until the PCs go insane from repeated Terror and Despair attacks.

[Foxwarrior]

Not to poke holes in your idea or anything, but there's nothing weird about thinking that only despair can combat spiral energy: spiral energy is an infinite power source accessed by not giving up; of course the counter to that is to make them give up.

And Gurren Lagann isn't impossibly soft: it's an intellectual analysis of the Star Wars and Green Lantern powers which demonstrates that letting a power source ignore conservation of energy in favor of being arbitrary mental attribute-limited should be more setting-defining than some wimpy parlor tricks.

[Lokathor]

It's weird that they left the spirals on their planets at all, instead of just incinerating the planets and exterminating all life once the spirals were defeated the first time.

As to hard or soft... whatever. Being an intellectual analysis of other works... I just don't see it. Even if it was that thing, it wouldn't matter, because that doesn't make it any more grounded in reality.

[Username17]

While for simplicity, I think Mooks are going to want to have their main action dicepools written explicitly and most of their skills left unwritten, I believe they are still going to need stats. Because your stats are your resistance dice pools.

-Username17

[Artless]

If you readily recognize that the Anti-Spiral's tactic of "well we will fight them on equal footing, therefore we will have the advantage!" is baddumbwrong, why would you advocate it's inclusion as the Mi-Go's true agenda?

There was nothing stopping the Anti-Spirals from curbstomping the humans before they put up resistance. "Absolute Despair" is meaningless, and their methods to force it upon the Dai-Gurren are repeatedly shown not to work. Instead, the times the humans are shown to actually panic and despair are when the Anti-Spirals use a conventional, intuitive idea of overwhelming force and just try to kill the humans with bigass robots and the moon.
In addition, by letting the monkeys dictate the "level of discourse," as it were, they gave them opportunities to develop tech to defeat them. Which they did. Almost immediately. Then Simon, who would have been executed, is put back in charge, making the entire effort to make the humans turn on the sole Spiral user pointless.

That's exactly how implementing it as a deliberate tactic by the Mi-Go would work. Repeated engagements on an equal footing with the Mi-Go would give the Union the ability to develop weapons and defenses against them, and allow them to cultivate agents trained specifically to fight the Mi-Go. The Union has no compunction to stay at the same level as their opponents, so why would the Mi-Go if they were making a conscious effort to eradicate us?