The Gaming Den

The people who make replica swords from literature seem to think that Heron Marked Swords look like this: Heron Marked Sword Which is not really a katana, and more like an infantry sabre. Which means that yes, to the extent that Heron-Marked Swords were influenced by Katanas, that's more similar to...

Made-up words require brain space, but I don't think any balked at "heron-marked sword" for "katana" in Wheel of Time at all.

Light a torch, don armor, pray to the gods.

This armchair generaling on how one needs to make a perfectly moral product has very little connection to reality. Everyone here has played some mix of WoD and Shadowrun and CoC and L5R. No one, not one person refused to play those games for the reasons we're pretending would be deal breakers here....

The only safe bet is to avoid real EVERYTHING. I mean, people talk about how the Klingons are maybe the Russians in WWII, but they don't say it very loudly because almost nothing matches, most notably their name not matching an identifiable real culture. As the franchise evolved and more stories wer...

Name checking actual religions and peoples' actual gods is, I think, kind of fucked up. Doing the monster manual treatment to monsters is not. Dominions has straight up Gandharvas and that's fine. But the Shiva analog is called "The Destroyer" and not literally named Shiva and the entire ...

Not using the word "tengu" doesn't mean that you can't steal liberally from the stories and culture that inspired it, but it does cleanse your inevitable hamfisted take on that culture. You are going to fuck it up. That's the world we live in now, where no one can lift cultural elements wh...

You could scrub a lot of the nasty parts of cultural appropriation and slurs out by just using different words that aren't real or faux Asian language words, and thus have a lot of baggage stripped out. So you'd never get to use "gaijin" again, but calling people "Outlanders" is ...

Eclipse's Charm stealing is honestly kind of nonsensical. The charmset in Exalted is explicitly not a final set and you are encouraged to make your own. So there's no actual in-game reason to buy foreign charms at a markup instead of saying you invent a new charm that is also better because you are...

I don't think Frank and I are going to do a wrap-up, so here are the bits I consider useful from a game design standpoint: The Yozi Infernals takes the Yozi from the base game and converts them from bog-standard villains into a really interesting RPG NPC character and a very interesting inspiration ...

So you want a game where your choices of stats and Charms doesn't mean that you can't win? Honestly, I may have misinterpreted this, the double negative made it confusing. Longes said the social combat minigame is deterministic, meaning if I have a 9 and you have a 10 then my loss is inevitable, ev...

EightWave wrote:That is an ugly straw man argument and you know it.

I wish. I'm honestly confused here.

I guess that's the contradiction that I don't get. Being forced to retreat from a mini-game that I'm bad at doesn't count as "skullfucking" in my opinion, especially when there is another mini-game like combat where being bad at it means the GM can take your character sheet and rip it up....

Exalted is worse than Vampire because every single one of its mechanics is dysfunctional. Literally, anything you can bring Exalted mechanics in for makes your session worse than just MTPing it. Unlike Vampire where it's only mostly the case. At least in Vampire you can make a social check without ...

Exalted is worse than Vampire because every single one of its mechanics is dysfunctional. Literally, anything you can bring Exalted mechanics in for makes your session worse than just MTPing it. Unlike Vampire where it's only mostly the case. At least in Vampire you can make a social check without ...

Mechanically, Exalted is as badly designed as Vampire. Nah, Exalted is worse. It's tempting to say that Vampire plays smoother just because of the fact that the World of Darkness is low fantasy - that most of the world is our world and that you can look outside or look on Wikipedia to fill in setti...

This whole line of argumentation (in defense of Exalted) strikes me as very lazy, and typical of defenses for bad games in general. Yeah, maybe it doesn't make any difference and we can all just have a tea party - so why the hell are we filling excel spreadsheets full of ki powers and jade swords a...

The only reason to write up Hardened Devil Body is to take it when you also take Ox-Body Technique and thus double up your Health levels (not a great use of Charms, btw). I'm pretty sure all of the "I can take someone else's Charms" castes specify either "You can't learn more than on...

Here's a “Charm Cloud” from a different book: http://pre05.deviantart.net/cd1b/th/pre/i/2015/301/3/3/exalted___charm_tree___athletics_by_beachfox-d9en2rt.png I'm almost afraid to ask 1) Um... the charms with in-degree 0, which are what you have to take first (?), are in a cross around the title of ...

Is the non-combat stuff in Exalted any good? Like, I know Celestial Circle sorcery can summon demons; can you summon an army of demons? Can an army of demons wear down a high-level solar exalted? For my sins, I tried to figure out how the various superpowers in Amber Diceless interacted. If you hav...

Exalted is a very rules-heavy game. Most of those rules are for combat and activities directly tied to combat, like movement and stealth. Heck, until 2E subsystems for anything else hardly even existed and in 2E swords explicitly trumped words. Combat is not very interesting to roll through for any...

2E: Run a combo each round and perfect defend everything, because passive defenses are pretty much 100% non-viable in the Solar league, your manapool is your health bar. 2.5E: Passive defenses are semi-viable, so use them by default and if your passive defense fails to filter out an incoming attack...

I can think of another reason no one will ever play this arc: people don't play villains so that they can have "heroic arcs".... I disagree. Vampire: The Masquerade is literally that game and its very popular. Sure, most people play it as undead superheroes, but some people really did wan...

So he is (according to the interwebs, anyway): https://thirdexalt.fandom.com/wiki/Ligier please don't explain what in fuck FETICH SOUL OF MALFEAS means. The demons are all part of a respective Yozi as components of thier soul. Think of the fetich soul as a lich's phylactery, except it's also a pers...

Koumei wrote:Unlike all those Steam sales, I'll show more interest when the game actually exists. Or at the very least is more than "a fairly short trailer that is mostly just a collection of snippets from cut scenes".

The trailer is really giving me a "great for 90s, bad for now" vibe.