Posts made by Killer Klown

@Insomnia On the plus side, it's Dune. On the minus? It's Funcom. I'm pretty sure they've rewritten the nomenclature so that 'com' is now some kind of Boolean value that equates to a prefixed !

@Doozer It is rather disappointing - it's not that anything is bad, per se; it's just that it's wholly unremarkable and, beyond the few moments-at-a-time of flying around, nothing really stands out.
Except for one thing. Something I discovered last night and I encourage anyone who has the game installed to try out.
1> Get a Colossus
2> Activate Shield
3> Charge anything and everything in front of you.
Seriously. I play solo on normal difficulty; there's a mod that boosts your charge damage by 300 percent or something like that; and you literally steamroll through groups of Dominion troops/buggy footsoldiers/resource nodes. Don't even need to use the 'bash' key - just freight train your way across the battlefield back and forth. Forget Storm lighting bolts. Forget Interceptor acrobatics. This is where it's at.

@Seraphim73 True, though I don't think anyone wants to lose either. The statement applies just as much to GM characters as it does PC's; and while the GM does have a story to tell, they also need to keep in mind that they're dealing with real live players - and they need to plan for the fact that the players won't stick to a script and may, in fact, outsmart or outfight the bad guy du jour.
More than failure, though, what I (and a number of folks who have talked to me over the years regarding scenes where this was a factor) find more egregious is the sense of wasting our time. This isn't the same as failure or not accomplishing something; but rather a point where you end the scene in no different a position than where you began. Most often this seems to happen when the big foozle is either somehow untouchable despite everything the players try, or has some equally mysterious trap door to escape at the last minute that the players had no way of detecting or stopping; but there are other non-combat related instances that I've seen it come up, too. Failure might irk people in the immediate sense, but getting a feeling that you're inconsequential or that the GM has a story to tell and will tell it regardless of what the players do or where the dice lead usually means people will just stop showing up for scenes. In my experience, most scenes (especially in things like Mage or Werewolf) involve a lot of time and effort beyond the few hours devoted to the scene itself. People do a lot of pre-planning and preparation; be it setting up spells, acquiring/creating items, researching the area or target, or what have you. That can span days, or even weeks, before the scene itself happens - and having all of that lead up to nothing leaves the players with both a sense of failure and that none of it really mattered; which does tend to get frustrating.
This goes back to what I was saying up there about 'failing forward' (A term I first saw used in WH40k: Wrath and Glory - which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite underdog games and is one of the best RPG representations of the settings I've seen), where everything is focused not on success or failure, but on advancing the plot; and it applies to both the GM and the players. If the players succeed, the GM needs to have a contingency in play that can continue their story without removing the feeling of success that the players might have. Even if they fail in the overall goal, though, the players still do need to get a sense of some kind of accomplishment; and it's up to the GM to work unexpected actions on the players part into the plot without removing the sense that the players can actually affect the world around them.
As an example, something that happens fairly often in WoD games - a murder plot. Scenario is that there's been a lot of ritual-style killings around town; bodies flayed, arcane or obscene symbols drawn in blood, the whole nine yards. To break it down in WoD terms, the individual sessions would be players investigating these murders, piecing together clues, building a profile. The GM's job here is to dangle enough carrots for them to keep up the investigation, while not letting them have the whole fruit basket in a single session.
From there the Chapter ends with them finding out who the killer is, where they lair and - if supernatural - what their habits and vulnerabilities might be. They close in, engage and fight the guy. Fight could go one of two ways; the dice are not with them or they didn't take everything in to account and the foozle whomps them. They take some losses but, if they're smart, manage to pull back and extricate. Even by losing, though, they've found out some valuable information on the foozle - more about his capabilities, or that their initial assessment of what he was was wrong, or maybe someone recognized something in their lair that led to a different line of investigating.
On the other hand, they could win.
And if they win, yaay. They won. However, when they loot the corpse they discover that the foozle kept a scrapbook, and in that book are newspaper clippings of similar murders going back hundreds of years - and some more recent ones that happened in other locations at exactly the same time that the ones the players had been investigating. Or maybe a few days after the fight, a player catches a news report that the killings are still going on. Maybe the foozle can be in multiple places at once. Maybe he's back from the dead. Or, maybe, he's part of a larger cult; or just a patsy for a greater evil. Maybe that foozle was completely inconsequential and the real killer is still out there. Either way, the players might have succeeded in their stated goal (kill foozle), but ultimately the scene failed in it's objective (stop the murders); while still allowing a way forward to further chapters to find out about and, ultimately, confront whoever/whatever's really in charge.

Losing the fight still allowed the players to accomplish something; while winning it didn't put an end to the killings, even though the players preparation and dice paid off.

I don't know that there's any hard and fast rule for this since everything's pretty fluid - and some of the ones I can think of might actually seem contradictory. For example, it's important to keep in mind who you have playing in the scene. If you have a bunch of combat monkeys, a social or investigative scene probably won't be very enjoyable. At the same time, it's important to not make the scene overly reliant on a specific skillset. If everyone automatically 'won', there'd be no point in gming it. Likewise, if there is only one person in the group with a sufficient level of skill and they drop the ball for whatever reason <miss the roll, don't show up for the scene, etc>, it could derail the entire thing.

Flexibility, really, is the key factor. Have a decided start point and an ideal end point; but understand that things might not always start when and where you want them to, that players will invariably take the smallest detail you mention and assume it's going to be something major, and they will find some unusual method of solving the problem that you didn't account for. Above all else, don't steal victory from the players. Make it hard, make it challenging, make it something that normal methods wouldn't be able to solve - but if the players come up with something, prepare sufficiently, or otherwise have an answer for everything that you throw at them; let them have it. For that, always have a backup plan. The villain that you had intended to be the main bad guy and escape, but that the players inconveniently killed off, was in fact just a pawn for some extradimensional horror that won't be revealed until a couple of sessions later <when you've had time to come up with it>. The massive plot they foiled did, in fact, save the day and win the battle; but it left a power void in the criminal underworld that another group was all too eager to step in and fill once the PC's turned their attention away, etc.

I think that, more than anything else, is something I rate as extremely important - sometimes the players will win. Sometimes they will dominate the enemy <especially if it's a long-standing or high powered game. Power levels are relative, after all>; never let them feel that their efforts are wasted or ineffective - if they fail, they fail forward (Stealing a term from Wrath and Glory); but if they succeed, they succeed forward too. The individual scene is less important than what comes next, what's waiting in the wings, or what challenge awaits.

@Arkandel Yeah, exactly. I'm not defending the portrayals or in any way trying to justify them - but, having read the book, I don't think the authors were either. They are horrible events presented as being horrible; because horror is what Vampire has always been about at it's core. Everyone around you is monstrous, and the things that are normalized in Kindred society tear at the human part of your consciousness - and a core tenet of the game is that conflict, the internal question of what you as the PC do in response to that; be it accept and normalize the behavior yourself or continue to fight against it for as long as you can, especially in light of the fact that you have to do at least some of it just to survive? And if you normalize that, how long will it take for you to accept and justify the next step down the ladder?
Either way, I never got the sense that this sort of thing was glorified in any way except by in-character or in-theme fluff text. Rather they were presented as factors of the world and events/archetypes that might be encountered and ostensibly dealt with. Then again, even back in the day, some people weren't mentally or emotionally sound enough to make that distinction either, so I suppose the complaints aren't that surprising.

@Ghost Nevermind there was an entire faction of Werewolves that, by canon, were neo-nazis <and a bunch of vampires who were straight up nazis>.
Also, oWoD pulled that same kind of thing - although I don't recall them using current events, they did claim supernatural happenings were the reason for a number of historic events <Russian revolution, inquisition; hell, they framed the entire Native American genocides and atrocities within the 'Wyrm' war>

EDIT - Also, it wasn't just the sociopolitical stuff. I remember someone crying in an article about how much sexual and emotional assault was involved. I was like... uhm. Have you met V:tM?

@Ghost It really was undeserved; given that a lot of what was presented was milder than ... I'd have to say most of the original books. People can make the 'times have changed' argument and all that, but really they were just giving people more of what they had in the early editions (As opposed to the CoD stuff rewriting everything)

@SunnyJ I actually live and work around DC - so it's interesting to see an entire game set in it (Admittedly, some of that is due to the 'that doesn't go there' factor.)
I did get a couple of hours into it when I got home yesterday, and - at least for the early part here - they seem to have resolved a lot of the issues I had with it. Even the starter weapons seem to be decent, and cover is far more useful. There's been some odd bugs and the game did crash a fair bit; plus the optimization isn't what it could be; but all that is fixable given it's still just a beta.

I preloaded it last night, but haven't been home yet to try it out. I liked the setting and general setup of the original, but my biggest problem was that the enemies were all bullet sponges and cover was tantamount to useless due to almost every one of them having some grenade type ability. (Your grenades only ticked a small amount off their health - whereas they could kill you with like 2 of their own) Hopefully they fixed that.

I've argued with myself on this many times over the years; usually beginning with the question of 'why am I still doing this'. Like I do with most things, I've gone through internalized rants of self-justification and reasoning/denial and what have you; but only within the last year or so have I managed to distill it down to a simple and, at least for me, undeniable form

There are exactly two types of things in life - the things you do because you have to, and the things you do because you want to. Sometimes a thing can be both of these, but the distinction is only one way. That is, it's fine if it's something that you have to do, which you also want to do <like a job that you love>. There is never any good reason for something that you want to do turning into something that you have to do; gaming is, always has been, and never should be otherwise a thing that you want to do. If it - any aspect of it - becomes something that you feel you have to do, then it's time to re-evaluate.

@Derp Ah, when you put it that way - yes. A paradox is still a paradox, and it's still bad juju. My line of thinking was that the baseline of what is an acceptable power level goes up as your Arcana does, because you can start to perform more powerful effects (ones that might have risked paradox if you tried something that out of the ordinary when you first learned it) without that risk.

@Derp said in Mage 2e game - The Golden Road:

@skew said in Mage 2e game - The Golden Road:

If you're at 3, and cast a level 3 spell, you get 1 free reach. That's almost always going to be used for "Instant". If you want to, say, cast it by sight, or use it on more than one person, or make it last more than 2 turns... you have to reach. Reach, reach, reach.

Which is fine, but remember what it is Reach actually stands for -- extending yourself beyond your current safe levels of practice in order to achieve a result. Most (sane) mages are not going to do that when there is a safer alternative, so Reach spells (and Paradox) tend to be the results of desperate actions.

If people are using that as everyday magic, then we should probably be having a different conversation -- namely about how Wisdom is viewed in the game and what the consequences for bucking those millenia of traditions are.

I don't entirely agree here; Reaches can and do result from desperate actions; but you also get them from having an Arcana higher than the level of spell you're casting. In that case it's not so much a 'Reach' as that you're casting something well below your skill level - like a nuclear physicist working basic arithmetic; so you can afford to do it faster/do it better.

@Ganymede said in I know it's an old topic but to this day....:

@Bananerz said in I know it's an old topic but to this day....:

Arguing about what is real when you're in a simulation.

Arguing about what is love when you don't want to be hurt no more.

Arguing about the justice system when you've just admitted to murder.

@Tinuviel said in I know it's an old topic but to this day....:

@killer-klown said in I know it's an old topic but to this day....:

There was this thing back in the 1800s where people finally got overwhelmed with the evidence that the earth was not, in fact, flat; so they said fine, it's not flat. It's torus shaped

Source?

Orlando Ferguson (Google turned up a few results - this was one: https://www.livescience.com/14754-ingenious-flat-earth-theory-revealed-map.html )

@killer-klown said in I know it's an old topic but to this day....:

Because apparantly it was easier to believe the earth's a giant donut than a sphere

It's not a sphere, it's an oblate spheroid.

@ominous There was this thing back in the 1800s where people finally got overwhelmed with the evidence that the earth was not, in fact, flat; so they said fine, it's not flat. It's torus shaped (Because apparantly it was easier to believe the earth's a giant donut than a sphere). I think we should combine that with the flat earth iceball - a flat disk of planet surrounded by a torus of ice (or vice versa).
We'll call it the Breathsaver theory.

@flitcraft There's a difference between 'weaker' and 'artificial limitation'. On the one hand, M+'s are weaker by design - because they're basically just mortals with a few bells and whistles; and people know what they're getting into when they opt to play one. On the other hand, cutting parts out of a sphere because someone deems them too powerful is, at best, arbitrary - and stands to upset the overall balance of the game. Mage already has a number of restrictions built into the system that would usually address most of the issues people have with the system (Especially in CoD, where the other Supers gained a significant amount of power while Mage gained more restrictions/reductions) - but those restrictions need to be enforced across the board. People need to keep track of how much extra mana spontanious casting costs, how much mana they can spend per turn in light of that <that one is almost universally ignored from the scenes I've witnessed firsthand - and not just when it comes to mage spends>, how many spells they have up/are using and the stacking penalties for going over that limit and so forth.
Though, I do agree that 5 is a good cutoff for power stats in a normal game for everyone involved. Maybe go as high as six if you want to start talking hero-class stuff (Since there are a couple of merits that I remember from the various systems that require PU/BP of 6)

Re: @Derp - that's true, and why I said it works better on paper. The down side is that most stories are conflict-driven - even if it's not open warfare, a degree of antagonism keeps things moving. Without that hanging in the background things tend to stagnate, or you just run out of things to throw at players.

@derp Yeah, but that's not just for Mage. They seemed to take a different track in the entirety of nWoD with regards to antagonism. In oWoD there were defined 'good' and 'bad' guys, and they were pretty diametrically opposed - like Camarilla and Sabbat, or Gaians vs the Wyrm, or what have you. In nWoD they sort of tiered it out; you have the PCs, then you have another group that's like the PCs but of a different ideology <The Pure, or Seers> then you have a third group that's more or less guano loco <Bale Hounds, Scelesti> which tend to work in the service of some bigger, badder inhuman evil <Acamoth and such>. On paper it's a better, more layered idea - but the presentation was lacking. The idea of conflict and war was burned into the older versions from the getgo. You knew your Werewolf hated the Wyrm, you knew the Camarilla and Sabbat were in a state of conflict spanning centuries. It was a constant, present threat. In the new system, though, it's all left kind of vague due to the way the books are structured. The main guide focuses just on the players, and eventually you might get some information on the other groups out there - but by that point people have already cemented what they want their canon to be.

@gangofdolls True. Losing Paradigm was one of my biggest problems in nWoD; just because there's something that says you can do something doesn't mean you would IC. At least 2e emphasizes the usefulness of rotes in that they're not just ways to use alternate dice pools - but rather provide tangible mechanical benefits, so people are more likely to focus on specific spells rather than falling back to spontaneously casting everything.