Posts made by bored

@deadculture Yes, it has them and they cover basically everything, including swordsman schools and magic. You get a few from your backgrounds, and then can buy some more at variable cost.

The CG itself is perfectly fine, I'd say dramatically improved over 1E's ridiculously complex and min-maxable approach.

The problem is that the swordsman schools themselves basically triple-quadruple your effectiveness in combat, as you go from 'spend a raise to do a wound' to 'spend a raise to do wounds equal to your weapon skill and/or get some awesome secondary effect too.' Despite the fact that the game lets you use raises from basically any skill to fight (ie, you can DK a barrel at someone with athletics, intimidate some mooks away, etc), there are really no equivalents to this major ramp-up for non-combat approaches.

Also guns are kind of broken.

@faraday Yes, considering that I'm talking about 2E, I'm familiar with the roll system. There was confusion between Theno talking about his existing 1E at the same time as discussion of the new system.

For either of you, I'm not entirely sure why it's unsolvable. Just doing some napkin versions, I see that you can end up with algorithms that won't give you necessarily the same sets, but I haven't found a situation where you end up with a different number of raises.. The only possible rules impact is that you can end up with versions that will prefer to use up all the dice versus ones that will leave some unused, but couldn't that just be a roll toggle? I'd love to see an example of a roll that would confound a simple algorithm (like sort, for each find lowest that gives you >=10, if you don't, add on the lowest and do it again)?

I'm actually kind of surprised that the roller, of all things, was what gave you trouble.

I am an amateur coder at best, certainly nowhere near as proficient as @Thenomain, but I had a fairly comprehensive RnK roller for my L5R game that could handle most of the permutations possible, even including things like keeping lower dice, and both constant adders on top of dice adders (ie a rolll agility + weapon keep agility + staticvalue, which was common in L5R 4e but obviously is kind of syntactically annoying). I don't think 7S has anything significantly different.

Maybe I'm totally blanking on what the problem was and talking about something much simpler?

@Thenomain said in 7th Sea 2nd Edition:

@bored said in 7th Sea 2nd Edition:

PvP is basically not on the menu

You say this like it's a bad thing.

I'll entirely agree on everything else.

I think, by and large, the people in our hobby (or the subset that are active here) like PvP, possibly more than they'll admit to. Maybe not the most extreme versions, but when you move beyond the 4-6 people all doing one thing that is assumed in table top, its sort of hard to imagine everyone doing their things and no one ever coming into conflict over it, especially when the setting itself sets up major rivalries.

I'd much prefer that the rules could handle it and then staff could figure out how much to encourage/discourage, rather than just leaving me with bad tools from the get go.

Having just come back from a trip to the Caribbean with a camera full of Spanish fortresses, I am both filled with inspiration and at the same time still vaguely underwhelmed by the new books.

Without getting into a huge simulationist/narrativist debate, I'm just not sure the mechanics are at all suitable to MU-style play, especially since PvP is basically not on the menu. Beyond that, Swordsman Schools seem even more mandatory, not less (the impression the playtest gave us to build up our hopes), and there's so little guidance to building Risks / Consequences / etc that I'm pretty sure things would quickly devolve into a mire of inconsistency and the associated impression of favoritism, rightly or wrongly.

@Thenomain said in Dragon Age: Smoke & Shadows:

@bored said in Dragon Age: Smoke & Shadows:

I don't disagree with your conclusion, I just stress that you avoid the problem by addressing that 'if'. If FCs are important? Are they ever justifed for all the crapton of BS they cause?

Yes.

I think history is against you. I'd love to hear some examples of them being actual net positives on games, in ways that just as easily couldn't have been accomplished by characters who didn't get a bunch of lolzy 'I win 4 free' stats, or with more egalitarian availability of upper and lower tier characters.

@Arkandel Sure. Your argument is effectively @Ganymede's argument that we've had on this topic elsewhere.

I don't disagree with your conclusion, I just stress that you avoid the problem by addressing that 'if'. If FCs are important? Are they ever justifed for all the crapton of BS they cause?

In my MUing history, the answer is a resounding no. Can I think of good RPers who were good on FCs? Sure. But not one of those games didn't also have total jackasses on them too, or have the good ones still be elitist twats, or any other number of problems. I just don't see a benefit to MUing caste systems, which is what this shit boils down to: an elite caste of players, and then a bunch of shmucks.

And the members of this elite caste? Maybe slightly better RPers than average who are maybe are less dickish than average, all based on the totally unbiased judgment of their closest buddies.

So yeah, fuck all of that noise, every single time. If 'feature' roles are important to the theme, OK, but every single player needs to qualify for them alongside their pleb alts. That's the only way it's not a nepotistic shitshow, every single time.

@Arkandel said in Dragon Age: Smoke & Shadows:

@Thenomain said in Dragon Age: Smoke & Shadows:

Morbid, hell, I think it should be required information. Knowing the perks of staffing is one of the checks against staff taking more advantages than players, or getting in the way of players having fun.

Yes, but in my experience - which admittedly might be anecdotal - the problem is less staff alts (staff tend to be pretty busy and can't play their own games very consistently) and more staff friends, which is a different issue altogether. Because then what is a 'staff friend' defined by? A good reliable player? Their buddy? RL bf/gf? To some extent any player trusted to play an important feature character has to be at least known by staff.

And that's without even factoring the subjectivity and petty jealousy some players are naturally inclined to demonstrate in MU*. Did Theno get given Hawke which I wanted? That fucker is obviously TSing/sucking up to staff.

This is basically why I am universally anti-feature (in the sense being discussed here, again, the comic sense is something else).

No matter how much staff promises its fair, no matter how much they say it's good players getting the slots, its going to be their friends (even if just by virtue of their friends knowing about the game first) and it's going to turn into a muddy mess. Even generally ethical people have trouble telling close friends (let alone SOs etc) 'no', or will just have distorted perceptions of how much favoritism they're really showing.

Without really commenting on the drama that is a lot of fun to popcorn, I will say that this reinforces my decision to take a pass on the game. This is despite having a couple people ask me to come join them there or go make new characters on it (since there's such a lack of L&L right now).

I would also really emphasize the lack of staff presence. I encountered this when trying to chargen, there just seemed to be 0 new player support at all. It doesn't seem much a stretch that if they can't bother to engage new players they're probably not going to be running plots for them either.

Yeah, to people ( @Arkandel and maybe others) saying its the # available, my universal anti-FCism applies in the typical WoD/SW/L&L/etc-game usage of it (ie 'cool overpowered plot-shielded char that gets given to a staff buddy') and not the Comic FC vs OC sense where if there's tons of FCs, they're totally fine (probably even the norm).

@Nausicaa said in Dragon Age: Smoke & Shadows:

I don't really mind FCs in general. They can be fun if handled properly. I think my main hold back is only that Hawke is a playable FC. Hawke is basically a blank slate with an identifiable name.

Yeah, this is the reason it makes me the MOST uncomfortable. Since the character doesn't have a set identity or anything, the only thing turning a PC into a Hawke does is mark them as more special. They're not constrained to move the plot along in particular ways or serve some specific thematic focus. It's akin to letting someone play a non-canon but still feature Bob Skywalker.

Yeah, reading more, the PC Hawkes is just.. I don't know why you'd bother. And hering 'they're working closely with staff' and 'they're not going to be the focus of the game' in the same breath just sets off all kinds of alarms. Frankly, I just don't believe it. It's the same thing staff says on every one of these games, and on every one of these games, it turns out to be BS.

The worst thing about it is there's no reason to do it with Dragon Age. It really isn't a setting that relies on a singular messiah the way Star Wars does, and yet (some) games manage to do Star Wars without playable Skywalkers.

The FC thing makes me hugely wary, as much as I'd otherwise be all over this.

I would like to know what they're doing system/statwise as well. As ever, I have little tolerance for 'oh yeah and we have some feature slots that are just amazeballs powerful because reasons (our buddies need favors)' these days.

@Coin @Arkandel I mean its fine if you want to just say everyone is in a certain range of Generations and has the full range of blood potency and its just something you spend XP on, although I don't know if I'd really want to bother with the new torpor rules still. They were one of my big turnoffs from new Vamp, as it creates a very weird situation with elders waking up ... not actually being the terrifying forces of nature they're supposed to be.

Regardless, Victorian horror with vampires sounds fun, but Victorian horror with the usual 'magical rainbow of supernatural friends' is less appealing.

@Arkandel I assume you could still use it as the power stat, just deriving your value from Generation, and then toss out all the thematic stuff about torpor and potency loss.

The probablem with multi sphere is that you wouldn't be buying it up with XP and if other people could it would exacerbate the typical 'Vampires are the weakest splat always' problem. But I'm also a universal mage hater, and tend to be pro less spheres in general, so ymmv.

@Arkandel If I'm following you right, you mean using the newer ruleset and the older theme? I'd probably be down for it, I've never really liked most of the WoD 2.0 theme stuff and it's the main reason I'm not as heavily into WoD MUing as I used to be. I just never 'got' the new games.

Keep in mind there are places where the rules aren't theme-agnostic, like with Generation/Blood Potency/Torpor/etc.

I'm going to go ahead and say that when I play historical I want it to be vaguely accurate. That doesn't mean knowing who the Prime Minister is, but it does mean the social norms, class structure, general politics, and includes all the gender/race stuff being argued about. I guess I fall on the 'it gives you something to RP' rather than the 'it takes away things for you to RP' side, especially because there are 100x more modern games where you can play your woman-with-pants. Why go Victorian OTHER than for the costume drama aspect and everything that goes with it? Playing an aristocratic land owner with near-slave servants (because even in the places that abolished it, this continued) is something you can't do on a modern game (ghouls and BDSM fantasies aside). Neither can you play one of those servants plotting for greater things in life.

I think you want to make it abundantly clear that people aren't going to be OOCly punished for their character choices, or forced into RP they don't want, and that people are free to play outliers (ie, don't restrict concepts based on the supposed rarity of someone acting like that). But beyond that, I don't feel a lot of motivation to play history with mostly modern social norms.

@surreality

No, there was specifically a Victorian Changeling game. @Ganymede and @Thenomain were both involved, I'm not imagining things, I promise!

Didn't this game already happen when nWoD Changeling came out?

Anyway, if you want it not to be 100% about Mage, don't have Mage.

I really wish they would add some game modes, as well as balance out the frequency of game types.

It seems like the distribution is payload >>>> A->B > control mid, with the last one being really infrequent and yet the most balanced of the modes. With the others, the map balance seems really iffy and often seems to heavily favor one side (Temple of Anubis or Gibraltar for Defense, Hollywood / Numbani / Dorrado for Attack, as examples).

That said,I figure the game has a lot of room for expansion with more gametypes, characters, etc in the future. I am really enjoying arcade right now, what with some of the ridiculous stuff it enables (perma-fly Pharah is my current love).

Y'all should probably make a 5W thread.

That said, while I wouldn't take a position as extreme as @Admiral or @Ghost's, I can see where they're coming from. While the staff PCs might have been minor, but the key thing is that they played all the NPCs and the NPCs were the only people of... any influence, period. The politics/'what is really going on' were as opaque on that game as any I've run into, really, it was all stuff about the royal family's own succession and various NPCs vaguely shuffling around while the rest of us kind of wondered who was in charge and where we got our orders.

For my part, I was one of the few people playing an actual (if 2nd tier) HoH as opposed to an heir (either everyone else wanted to be young and hot, or all the 'real' HoHes were NPC), and despite his whole house setup/history/etc being about naval service, I was flat out refused being any part of the command structure. Sure, I was told I could 'earn it' (with no real clarity on what that involved), but that's a little odd when you're playing a 50-something year old supposedly at the high mark/end of his career, not the beginning. So I faffed around a little with PrPs for my family, eventually got bored and went on my merry way.

Ultimately, it didn't feel highly corrupt or anything, but it did feel like the people running the game were very self-involved and writing a story on their own, and weren't too interested in most of the PC population in the bigger scheme. We could definitely be the heroes of individual missions, but the grand scope of stuff seemed like it was 99% NPC controlled.

Oh, we're having this thread again.